Querido coleccionista: Vineyards for strolling, vineyards for working
La viña: paraíso idilico y lugar de trabajo intenso
This is the monthly appointment
and I have with our both pools of readers. It is our momemt for gathering our different audiences for an intra-newsletter dialogue where we jointly write here and on .Last month, we talked about Beaujolais nouveau and Novello wines, and their season, our memories attached to them and what to make of these wines.
This time, we hop into the vineyards. Come with us!
Remember that every month we cross our respective literary and gastronomic paths to write together on a common theme.
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Vineyards and wineries are places where hard work, innovation, tradition and leisure cross in an inexplicable knot. There’s more behind each sip of wine than pleasure and hedonism.
If nowadays vineyards and fields seem a place where wealthy investors and young city refugees try to find a deeper connection with themselves, we tend to forget how hard any agricultural job is.
Depending on the whims of a (changing, and fast changing) natural environment, with a touch of unpredictability in a time where we tend to forecast everything, agriculture is a a special kind of professional activity.
When I decided to work in a winery, I did so because I wanted to scratch below the surface and live the life that hides within the bottle. I wanted to follow a vintage, and its way into a bottle, and its trajectory towards the consumer.
I was lucky.
It was hard, at times. And rewarding, at times. I wrote about it recently.
I remember a boiling August with an interminable series of buyers coming to visit, and wine-pairing lunches ending with me, cross-eyed over an Excel sheet at the end of the day. I remember nights of social events and tastings, and us contracted workers busy cleaning glasses with the kitchen crew into the wee hours of the morning after, and I remember posh wine tastings in London and Frankfurt.
And then the long-awaited harvest, with people working day and night to ensure the precious grapes would arrive in a pristine state to the terrifying optical selection machine.
Harvesting is hard work, and ungrateful at times: you will need to wait quite a lot of time to see the fruit of your labour. Even if the only thing you do all day is handling…fruit.
I asked
this month:Una merienda en la viña: que te llevarías de comer en la vindimia?
A snack in the vineyard: what would you take to eat during harvest?
For me, wine and vineyards are inextricably connected with bread, cheese and some kind of preserved meat: salami, saucisson, chorizo. It’s the “merenda” I remember from my childhood- not in the vineyard, but in the similarly challenging harvesting time in our family apple orchards.
This parallelism between picking apples and picking grapes - to make something out of them, by means of fermentation, is something I am exploring right now and if you’re patient with me and will wait till January, I will be able to share with you.
Back to the vineyards!
Talking vintages and harvests with our dear friend Pedro Marques, the winemaker curating the vintages at Vale da Capucha near Lisbon and just before a nice lunch together, we opened some old vintages of their whites and we found wines that were vibrant, alive, and at the same time matured with time, from younglings to velvety ladies.
Vale da Capucha is a sort of small miracle: pristine wines, produced in an environment that is rich in fossils and Atlantic wind: a match made in heaven and expressed in impeccable, modern, beautiful wines.
Pedro is also a brilliant thinker - an outstanding outsider and at the same time, a pioneer: with his wife Sónia, they’re busy tending old vineyards and creating an own line of wines in Las Vedras, that are incredibly drinkable and beautifully aging.
During my latest visit to another winery, Foradori in my hometown in the Dolomites in Italy, I had the chance to enjoy a guided tasting, and whilst snacking on some bread and wine - the basics for a picnic, as I told you - I was delighted to see that at Foradori the concept of going full-circle with nature is a thing.
There are cows among the vineyards, calmly living their lives and chewing, which in summer go up in the mountains to munch happier and greener pastures. But their manure is then used for biodynamic mulching in the vineyards and their milk is cured into cheeses, served with the wines.
That, I thought, is the perfect pairing.
Every product comes from the same vineyard, from the same ecosystem, in a cosmic coherence that soothes the spirit.
Foradori is another miracle and is also reshaping the way wine is made and enjoyed in the area.
this time asks meEn qué viñedo te gustaría beberte el vino elaborado con las uvas de ese viñedo? Y qué vino sería?
In which vineyard would you like to drink the wine made with the grapes from that vineyard? And what wine would it be?
I respond once again with a picture and a tale.
A jar of pickles, a package of crisps, and surely some cheese, saucisson and bread. Sorry, baguette.
Maybe even a slice of jambon au persil. In this case, the bottle we opened is a delicious Domain Dandelion red. It’s a producer I always ask for when it’s in the wine list, I found it recently at Cuisine in Paris, a delicious bistrot and of course we had a bottle of this, exactly this one. Memories are a powerful thing.
But to the connoisseur's eye, the vineyard behind, with that unmistakable cross, is another altogether.
In March 2021, smack in the middle of yet another lockdown, we needed to drive our car from The Netherlands to Portugal, where we were relocating after a decade in the Netherlands. It was almost paradise, if it hadn’t been for a pandemic with no end in sight: Bourgogne was empty, sunny, beautiful.
We had the time to stroll around every winery we liked and every vineyard we could visit, and all the producers were idle and slightly bored and thus very happy to share a drink and a chat with some enthusiastic buyers (we did buy a pallet of wine, plus some cases, but that is a story for another day).
On that day we had packed a quick picnic in Beaune where we were staying at a very charming hotel, and we decided to have a late breakfast in the vineyards. After a visit, we found ourselves pulled towards the Romanée-Conti estate, and there we settled, undisturbed.
I dream I have is to doing exactly this, but whilst sitting on the small stone wall of La Tâche, my dreamiest and most beloved wine ever, and pop open a bottle of it, and sip it quietly while absorbing the terroir, the air, and the atmosphere.
A baguette, some cheese, some pickles and perhaps oysters. Bliss.
For you notice? I think there is a notable tendency in winemaking these days: wines without a vineyard and without a winery. A lot of entrepreneurs are launching -often expensive - wines created locally to be sold globally, a bit of a twist on Super Tuscan ones.
The wines, like the ones by Wines From Another World, are one-shot editions, always very special and unique, and catering for a customer that does not have this almost physical feeling of going to drink the wine under the vine that gave the grapes for it.
But where is the magic of the vineyards, in “merchant” wines that are produced with more attachment to the bottle than to the soil?
I love Elisabetta Foradori’s, aka la signora del Teroldego, wines. Pure terroir expression, honest and marvellous...
Supongo que sabes que antes de hacerte la pregunta yo ya sabia la respuesta ;) Daba por hecho que viñedo que sería, la botella que descorcharías y con que la acompañarías. Aun así me encanta leer la historia contada por ti e imaginarme por un momento yo también frente a esa parcela disfrutando de la magia de los vinos que salen de ella 😍