You may think me ungrateful but there is something a bit Groundhog Day about visiting wineries. Isn’t it just another set of presses, fermentation tanks and barrels?

I’ve had barrels likened to wombs, seen presses stroked with the sort of affection that ought to be reserved for pets or Ferraris and been sent through tiny holes into (empty) stainless steel vats with a torch to admire the insides. These, I can tell you, were amongst the better trips.

Perhaps the worst winery visit was to an estate that went a step too far in its bid to be ultra-clean and insisted we all wear white plastic coats, made from the sort of material typically reserved for bin liners. The walk to the outside, in the 90°c temperatures was perhaps the worst ten minutes of my life as I sweltered in my plastic shroud.

It’s silly to be glib though because whilst it’s true that a winery can’t transform shoddy grapes into brilliant wines, it’s very easy to destroy perfectly good fruit and make pretty horrid wine if the right tools – and the talent – aren’t in place.

The thought that goes into winery design and the kit you find in it is pretty impressive. Take, for instance, Tandem. This Navarra-based winery is one of the funkiest you’ll see.

The north-facing structure is built entirely from concrete; a material chosen expressly for its ability to maintain optimum temperatures inside for making and storing the wine. What’s particularly impressive is that design incorporates huge glass sheets that make the winery astonishingly light.

It’s not uncommon to find bottling lines and, more understandably, barrels of wine tucked away in the darkest areas of the building. At Tandem though, the fact that the building faces north and because of the layers they’ve created, there is light everywhere. It’s all the more beautiful for it.

Aesthetics are not the primary driving force behind the design though. The central purpose is to make the best possible wines and what Tandem (and many other wineries) wants is the ability to move the grapes and the resulting wines around the winery with gravity only. It’s a gentler way of working that causes minimum disruption to the wine.

Winemaking takes place on two levels: on the upper level, fermentation takes place in stainless steel tanks. From here the wines are gravity fed to the cement tanks on the lower level where the wines rest before being aged in barrel. It may sound fantastically simple but it takes serious thought to get it right.

At another winery I visited recently I was shown into a completely empty room. It was quite unremarkable with cement floors, a wooden ceiling and white painted walls. ‘What happens here?’ I asked. It was a room that was specifically set aside for a process known as malo-lactic fermentation. It’s a tricky, unpredictable process where the harsh malic acids are converted into the softer lactic ones.

What was remarkable about this room was that inside the walls were hundreds of meters of slim, plastic strips. Using computer technology, the winemaker was able to use these strips to control precisely the temperature of the room by running water at a pre-selected heat through them. In doing so, he was ultimately much more able to ensure a successful malo-lactic fermentation. It’s all very smart.

So, when I’m feeling a tiny bit jaded about the prospect of yet another winery visit, I give myself a metaphoric kick up the bottom, because there’s always something new to be learnt.

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