Andrew Jefford
‘There are, increasingly, two worlds of wine: the fine-wine machine... and then the rest’
A few months ago, I stood in a steep vineyard chiselled out of the acid schists of the Cap de Creus. this jagged headland, stabbing the mediterranean in spain’s far northwest, forms part of Do empordà; it’s just a few miles from france’s Banyuls, but still more exposed. the icy tramontane wind cut through my layers of clothing with dismissive ease. ‘they’re very clever,’ said Didac soto of mas estela. ‘when they hear the first bang, they go.’ he was talking about the wild boar, alert to the crack of a rifle; when the fruit is ripe, he has to climb the mountains to wire the entire vineyard against them, and patrol it every morning. But that, I learned with mounting incredulity, is just the start.
I’ve never visited a vineyard that’s as difficult to reach as mas estela: there’s no road up as such, just a track. when Didac’s parents, Didier soto and núria Dalmau, first arrived with their sons at the farmhouse, it was a ruin, uninhabited for at least 30 years. the core of the house had 10th-century origins, and Didier, an architect by profession, set about slowly restoring it. the plan was to make wine in this very difficult place. ‘we didn’t know how to make wine, but our grandfathers had done it,’ says Didac; ‘it was in our DnA.’ the locals gave them six months.
this is a winery with no water supply and no electricity supply. the family pumps water from a big well; electricity for the house is generated by solar power, and for the winery by an oil-fired generator. no lorry can reach the farm, so Didac and his father have designed and built all of their own winery equipment, including the tanks: an easy sentence to write, but a daunting engineering achievement. transporters dump the pallets of bottles in the nearest village; it then takes a whole day for Didac to ferry them all up to the winery by van.
the farm is run on biodynamic principles – though this, says Didac, is less onerous than the other challenges, given its remoteness in a naturally balanced biotope scoured by wind. Also making their way up the perilous track in recent years have been giant clay jars thrown by artisans moreno Léon, far to the west in extremadura, bought to replace the barrels that were formerly used. Bats live in the cellar. ‘You have to deserve to come here,’ smiles núria. I took a photograph of mother and son, swaddled in boots, scarves and blue anoraks, standing beside an orange tree whose fruit littered the ground. nearby two donkeys cropped the grass in amiable calm, impervious to the cold wind.
we talk about ‘wine-growers’, ‘wine producers’, ‘proprietors’ and ‘domaine owners’ as if all belong to a homogenous group. I can’t, though, match the experience of the soto-Dalmau family of mas estela to the daily lives of proprietors of classed-growth Bordeaux, whose work attire is a beautifully cut suit and tie, or to those of growers whose wines are sold on allocation, and on whose bank statements the zeros keep decimal points at arm’s length.
there are, increasingly, two worlds of wine: the fine-wine machine, with its stock-ticker scores, adjectival confetti, endlessly photographed labels ceaselessly flaunted on social media, auctioneers’ guff, collector’s obsessions and carefully stewarded exclusivity... and then the rest. Can we judge them in the same way? should we even taste them in the same way?
In one sense, we must – or critical objectivity is lost, hierarchies are frozen, imposters will profit, and the worthy will never find reward. But wine creation has a human dimension, too, and it’s sometimes heroic. mas estela’s wines, and others like them, offer that to us too. not just the place, in other words, but the effort in the place. that’s why the stories of wine often matter as much to drinkers as the mute earth, the silent clouds and the contour of a hill. there is a grandeur beyond the simply sensual; there’s a kind of taste to endeavour itself.
Andrew Jefford is a Decanter contributing editor and the Louis Roederer International Columnist of 2016 for this and his ‘Jefford on Monday’ column at Decanter.com/jefford