Wine Law

the Castillo del Wajay wine stands out, being produced in Cuba with Spanish grapes, and grown and harvested on the island 13 . For several years, Bodegas del Caribe S.A. has been distributing Spanish wines of well-known brands in their red, rosé and white varieties to hotel chains and shops, exclusively, Palacio de Arganza, Señorío de La Antigua, Señorío de Peñalba, Torre Mudéjar and Alba Real. Similarly, it sells purely Cuban wine both nationally and internationally 14 . In this sense, the creation of the infrastructure required to produce wines with fruit harvested on the island was of vital importance. The vines were planted in three locations in Cuba – Batabanó, Banao and Wajay –, with a total of 22 varieties being brought from Spain, eight of which have acclimatised and provided excellent harvests. Among the objectives of the joint venture, Bodegas del Caribe S.A. (represented by Cítricos Caribe from Cuba and Grupo Arganza from Spain) has included the production of dispensed wine and grape brandy, a new product for the country. In Cuba, until the 1990s, the existing grape varieties were mainly the “Cimarrona” and “Aramond”; from that decade onwards, ten new varieties were introduced into Cuba from Brazil, with good yields in warm areas of that country. More recently, about 20 new varieties of grapes were introduced in order to study their development in the tropical conditions of the island 15 . Nevertheless, there has been, since colonial times, a handcrafted production of wines. These were drinks whose production took into account some of the characteristics of the wine technology, but the vinification took place, not through the fermentation of the grape must – very difficult to cultivate in Cuba –, but through a variety of tropical fruits. Although, strictly speaking, they are not wines, the producers and the tradition itself have attributed them the name. Some local producers even claim to belong to the French tradition of artisanal wine production. Such is the case of Bodegas Rodríguez, located in the small town of San Blas (some 250 kilometres east of Havana), which produces and sells wines without the use of chemical additives. Although the producer Rodríguez has a one-hectare vineyard, where, in the middle of the mountains, he cultivates a type of grape that grows wild in Cuba, the “Vitis caribbean”, which arrived on the island 13 Cfr . “El auténtico vino cubano” in Excelencias Magazines , avaialble at : http://excellencesmagazines.com/caribe/el- vacio/gastronomia/el-autentico-vino-cubano. 14 Idem . 15 Vid . De La Fe, C. et al., “Desarrollo del cultivo de la vid en el sector campesino-cooperativo del occidente de Cuba”, in Cultivos Tropicales , Vol. 22, No. 4, 2001, pp. 44-45.