Paso-Primero Tinto - The First Step of ‘The First Step’*.
*The name Paso-Primero doesn’t quite translate to first step, but the slight bastardisation and the all-important hyphen saved us around £35,000 on our web address so we’re sticking with it.
I predominantly write these blogs because something (or someone) has rattled my cage and I feel the need speak out, defend myself or justify something. That’s all well and good but nobody wants to read the ramblings of a constantly defensive winemaker. Presumably you’re here because you love our wines so, every now and again, I think it’s important to remind you that I love our wines too. That’s why I think it’s time to talk about Paso. Or, more accurately, talk about Paso-Primero Tinto. It’s the wine that started the company so the perfect place to start a little series of blogs that run through our portfolio and tells you a bit more about the wines, their back story, their production and their reason for becoming a part of our little wine family. If I’m feeling particularly energetic this will also form the basis of a bourgeoning YouTube channel but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It took me four years to get back to writing a blog.
Finding the dream and deciding how to get there.
When we first started to take the idea of making our own wine seriously, we had to sketch out an idea for what we wanted to make. I know that sounds ridiculously simplistic, but we were starting from nothing and needed something to hang our hat on. There was no family vineyard to start working on, no trust fund ready to spend on a fading chateau. All we had was a dream of making our own wines and if that was going to happen, we had to work out where we wanted to go before we could start figuring out how to get there.
The main push towards creating our own wine took shape whilst we were working in Canada. It’s a phenomenal country and we were in amazing jobs which meant any move had to be right. Taking the leap to leave had to end up with us making something we really loved and be somewhere we could build something sustainable. I often joke at tastings that the main reason we chose to go to Spain was my GCSE in Spanish and a few family holidays to the Costas but it’s not a million miles from the truth.
We wanted to come back to Europe (Brexit wasn’t on the cards at this point) and we wanted to make wine in an area with a long history of making wines. Years of making English and then Canadian wine showed that frontier winemaking is best left to locals and wealthy believers who can ride out difficult years with the boundless faith they’ve built up in the excellent years. We didn’t have much to fall back on if we hit a run of bad years, so no matter how much we believed these areas had huge potential we wanted to take out the variables. That’s when we started list writing. Pros, cons, anything that could influence the business and the wines. I realise now that an exhaustive list of variables facing a new business is impossible and looking back, I was spectacularly naïve to think being able to make wine in a stable climate was our biggest issue. But, when it’s -38°C with the wind chill and you have to dig your way into work every day in winter (thanks for that Canada) it’s easy to see why climate becomes a big focus. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that climate consistency was possible but there are regions who are closer to achieving it than others and that’s where we based our first list of options. Spain was on that list, and after chatting about what the next move should be, we just about felt comfortable enough to take a punt on heading there. At least I could order a few beers and if you’re going to take a life changing punt, that sort of thing makes a big difference.
Moving to Spain, then not fully moving to Spain, finding a winery to make our wines, having a baby and splitting life between the UK and Europe during Brexit is a whole book, movie, and TV series, let alone a blog. But I promised to write about Paso-Primero Tinto, not my life story and it’s time I speed things up a bit. It’s not easy to be concise when so much has happened though. I go through the back story of Paso at tastings and every time I end up telling different parts and focusing on different issues/benefits/successes/failures because it was a ridiculously crazy time and everything that we’ve achieved has only come about because of those mad early years. If I dwell on them here though, it will lose the point of making a blog about our wines but it’s fair to say the mayhem of creating the business and settling our private life was only made palatable by the belief that we were getting close to realising our dream and making our own wine.
The Wine (finally).
With the location planned (and a winery found – that’s a whole other chapter in the book!), the first ambition for the business was simply to make a wine that we would have loved when we first started drinking wines. A wine that could go on any table and be something that people wanted to come back to time and time again. I’ve tried to put this into words many times and keep coming back to the ‘Shawshank Wine’. You’ve all seen the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. I absolutely love it (who doesn’t?) and there is a bit early on when Andy is tarring a roof with his fellow inmates. Whilst up there he overhears one of the guards is going to lose a load of money on an inheritance and offers to help him find a way of keeping it. In doing so, he manages to negotiate a reward for his services and in that living hell he didn’t choose to improve his prison-life long term, he chose to have a beer with his friends. I know it’s a novel and then a movie and not a documentary, but I love that. I have long believed in the power of the righteous pint after a hard day at work and it’s a beautiful moment in the winery when you all come together at the end of a shift to kick your boots off and share a beer. It’s something that the beer industry has traded off perfectly for years and I believe that wine has this ability to capture a moment too. Whether it’s your first half hour alone after putting the kids to bed, sitting down to watch your favourite box set, putting the needle down on that new album or getting ready to start cooking the evening meal. These are all wine moments. This is when I drink wine. Not analysing it in an ISO accredited glass with extensive tasting notes but real moments, in the real world, when only a glass of wine will do. And that’s the wine we wanted to make. The wine that you go back to time and time again. The wine that is always in your wine rack because while modern life means you can’t plan these moments, you can at least be ready for them.
To achieve all this, we had to make a wine we truly believed in and the idea of making a wine that would be our personal ‘house wine’ was born. A wine that above all else, we wanted to drink and keep in our wine rack.
With that in mind we set about making a red wine with clear fruit focus, a hint of age but embracing the exuberance of youth, a careful use of oak, a depth of flavour and enough acidity to sit with food but a softness to the palate to make sure it’s still a wine to be enjoyed on its own. This is why Paso-Primero Tinto is a blended wine. We try to take the attributes we love from the varieties we have available to make a wine that is more than the sum of its parts. It means longer hours in the cellar as we treat every parcel of fruit as if it could be a wine in its own right, but it gives us far more options for capturing that initial dream of making an endlessly drinkable wine. We take the body and chocolate-box cherry softness from our Merlot, some guts and weight from the Cabernet-Sauvignon, a bit of raspberry tabaco from our Tempranillo, some bright, berry fruit from our Garnacha and add some serious silk to the finish with our Syrah. The percentages of each change with the vintages and we’ll be including other varieties as we go too (Moristel will definitely come in at some point to help us drop that alcohol) but while the wine changes, the goal is always the same; make the Shawshank Wine!
Some years Paso-Primero Tinto is the easiest wine to make and in others it’s the most difficult, but I keep coming back to it with a smile on my face. We’ve added some amazing wines to out portfolio but Paso-Primero Tinto is always the wine I’m proudest of because it’s the wine that fulfils the brief we set out at that kitchen table in biblically cold Canada. It reminds me of what we wanted to achieve when we started out and it reminds me of the joy of discovering the first wine that made me think this is the life for me.
I hope you can see what we were going for with this wine and even more so, I hope you’ve tried Paso-Primero Tinto and think we’ve achieved our goal. It is still the wine I drink the most, it’s definitely our biggest seller and even after seven vintages we’re looking at ways to improve it. It’s now organic, hand harvested and an extensive blend of up to seven varieties as we seek that perfect set of attributes to make it a true ‘moment’ wine. It’s soft and sultry, with bags of bright, ripe fruit and the all-important but often elusive, moreish quality that makes you want the next sip, the next glass and maybe the next bottle. I know everyone will have a different ‘wine moment’ but for me, this wine fits more moments than most.