BD: Can you describe the wines?
GC: The white is a blend of three white grapes (Macabeo, Xarel-lo and Parellada) with a secondary fermentation. Then we add 15% of Moscatel to have all those romantic and flowery flavors. It goes very well with seafood — all kinds of fish and shrimp.
The rosé is a premium rosé. There is a big trend for premium rosés right now. For me it goes very well with a lot of Thai and other spicy cuisine — it cleans out the pallet, but at the same time it has the body to stand out.
The red is the first wine we made. To me, it was clear that we needed to go with a Tempranillo. So this is 100 percent Tempranillo. It’s fruity, fresh, easy to drink — it has a lot of power on the fruit. It’s spicy, but at the same time it’s very easy to drink.
We also have the pink Moscato — the red has just 10 percent of the Tempranillo, just to give it a little twist. I like it as an appetizer. The French, they drink sweet wines as an aperitif. It’s really sweet, but refreshing at the same time.
BD: Why do you think new wine drinkers want something so sweet?
GC: We were seeing that the young people were getting into wine consumption later and later. Why? Because they have grown up drinking sweet drinks — soft drinks like Coca Cola or Fanta.
And second, when they want to get into the wine knowledge, the only thing they could find were the dark, really heavy-tannin wines like Cabs from Napa, Tuscans, Bordeaux — for a new consumer, they are not pleasing at all. They didn’t like it!
— Nicholas Upton