Wine workshop in Cafe Ajiaco restaurant

Achieving the perfect alchemy for success requires hard work and dedication. In Cuba, these days, the word competition has ceased being a sports term to become a quality meter and overcoming motive for many new business owners.

A high quality restaurant, Café Ajiaco in Cojimar, sought advice in an international company like Bodegas Torres to instruct its workers through a workshop on the world of wine . “We are honored to have the presence of this company in our restaurant. Through them we are looking for the instruction needed to create a wine list and enhance our waiters´ service, “Carlos Fuste one of the restaurant’s owners said.

In the lecture given by Carlos Acosta, Bodegas Torres representative in Cuba, the Café Ajiaco employees could learn about the production processes of the different varieties of wine, the characteristics of its raw material, its origin certificate, the bottles storage mode and the wine tasting. According to Acosta, it is not necessary to be a master sommelier to suggest a good wine in a restaurant but it takes knowledge to know what and why is being proposed.

Bodegas Torres is a producer and exporter wine company that partly originated in Cuba. It is ranked 11th in the world as a winery and it is placed first in Europe by the reach of its business. They have been present in Cuba since 1984.

The gastronomy sells a lot of wine so it is important for wineries to improve their relationship with restaurants. The aforementioned workshop is not a casual experience. Such instructive contacts have being carried in governmental and private business for a long time. The business restaurant in Cuba is becoming more specialized and hence the gastronomic sector is increasing the use of such contacts. Bodegas Torres considers as a key issue for the success of its business to promote wine culture in Cuba. Nowadays, with the boom of new economic measures, the new Cuban high quality restaurants are offering a wine list according to the category they want to achieve. However, for wine marketers in Cuba is still impossible to supply their firsthand products to private businesses, that’s why they are offering workshops, technical assistance and advice on purchases.

Fortunately this economic setback, despite increasing the price of wine consumption in restaurants, has not discouraged creativity and desire to improve in this very important sector for the Cuban culture. Despite the fact that in Cuba you cannot get a good wine, the pairing of our cuisine, with a strong Spanish influence, with wine, is an increasingly attractive subject for those who are slowly incorporating the culture of good eating to the cultural heritage of their lives.