Señor Capafons and a wonderful train ride.

This is already too long, but I have to start with a story, because otherwise Dave and I will be saying this phrase to each other and laughing and you won’t know why. When we were at Clos Mogador with Ania and Katya, they were talking about someplace that you go for dinner and it takes a very long time for actual food to come, but you have several drinks while you are waiting so that by the time the food comes you are DRUNK and STARVING (say that in your best East German or Polish/British accent). Then last night at the restaurant there was a whole group of people tasting wine for hours before they got any food (even bread!) and we looked at them and we could tell they were DRUNK and STARVING. So now you can use that phrase too.

Anyway, today was our last day in the Priorat. We finally got the sleeping temperature correct. Our room has French doors that open onto a balcony, and there are wooden shutters inside that close instead of curtains. The first night we had the shutters closed and the heavy comforter on the bed, and that was too dark and too hot. Second night we left the door slightly open but still with the big comforter, and that was better. Last night we left the door slightly open and didn’t put on the comforter, and that was just right.

We still didn’t get much sleep because it was late when we got to bed and early when we got up – yesterday when we were talking about snow, Ania told how her daughter got up very early one day when there was snow – 7 am! We packed and went down to breakfast, where once again we didn’t eat up to expectations. In fact I was only able to eat one piece of bread with cheese and ham, but I did pull my weight on the delicious fresh squeezed orange juice. We went up to finish packing, and Quima came up and gave us a bottle of wine from their vineyard, which was very sweet.

Right at 9:30 both Ania and Senor Capafons (he’s the only person that Rachel and Ania called “Senor”, and he’s in his 70s but you wouldn’t know it from how he looks and moves) arrived in their separate vehicles. We went put our suitcases in Senor Capafons’ car (I’ll call him Sr. C for short) and went to his vineyards. They are in the Priorat DOQ, and range in height from 300 to 600 km above sea level. One of the distinctions of the vineyards we went to see is that they have all the kinds of slate (llicorella) that are found in the area, so at one point we had to pull over and spend some time looking at a road cut that exposed the earth. He speaks Castilian Spanish very well, and we speak it a little, so most of the time he spoke Castilian and we followed along and Ania translated as necessary. While we were at the road cut he talked about his philosophy, which is not to follow organic or biodynamic methods but to seek harmony with the earth. Because the ground is so rocky, the organic soil layer (he called it the skin or the cap) is very thin, and because it barely rains, things don’t grow or decay very quickly. So if you disturb the cap, say by cutting terraces or rototilling, it’s like cutting a wound in your skin where illness can come in. Also when the rains do come, they come in very short, intense storms, and the cap helps to absorb the water and keep it available for the grapes. So his vineyards are very natural and he doesn’t do terracing or tilling on his hillside vineyards.

He told us all this, but I’m not sure we were quite prepared for what his vineyards look like, because if you saw them in Oregon you’d first of all wonder why anybody would try to plant vineyards on such steep slopes, and then you’d figure that they’d given up, because they practically look abandoned. There are all sorts of plants growing around them – not the neat rows of cultivated grass or other groundcover you’d see in our vineyards, but a wild mix of natural vegetation. Many of the plants were herbs, like lavender, rosemary, several varieties of thyme, and fennel. When Sr C came across one of them he would often pick some and give it to us to smell, so our memories of this vineyard are laced with wonderful odors. He said someone from L’Oreal cosmetics had come to the vineyard to smell things, because they’re so concentrated and delicious.

Not terraces - just paths.

We spent a long time at the first stop, which is his most successful vineyard. He had planted a terraced one earlier and decided that was not the way to go. This vineyard was used as a vineyard before phyloxera, and when they decided to replant it they used a special machine to scoop the old vines out to disturb the skin as little as possible, then used what sounds like a post hole digger to make little holes to put the new vines in, sticking them into the rocks. (American rootstock, of course, since it is resistant to phyloxera). They determined the spacing of the rows, and the angle of the rows, by putting stakes in the ground and observing the shadows through September and October to make sure the vines would have optimum sunshine at that time of the year. Then for the first 5 years, each vine was hand watered using an injector that went down 8 inches or so, to encourage the roots to go down for water.

Yes, he is that painstaking. After harvest they will also go through the vineyard weeding it by hand, to make sure that only the beneficial plants are growing, and to allow the bad plants to begin to decay and add to the cap. We also went to see an earlier vineyard that he’d terraced and been unhappy with, so he left it alone for several years to let the cap regenerate, and then began to work with it again. He says he visits each vineyard daily to see how everything is going. He also said that he feels there is a communication between him and the vines, and looking at how healthy they are and how he handled the plants we believed him. The slope-planted vineyard we looked at is also used as a demonstration vineyard, and vineyard managers from all over the world come to see it and learn from him. One vigneron from Bordeaux implemented his methods (adjusted for temperature and rainfall, of course) and his grapes were voted “best in Bordeaux”.

We drove to another vineyard which had some of the “hairy” or “downy” Grenache, which has a tracery of white kind of fur on the bottom of the leaves – if you don’t know, you might think it was diseased, but now you know and won’t worry if you see it. Also from there we could see another vineyard of his, and while we were looking at it and talking about it Sr C noticed that the workers who were picking had left a bin in another part of the vineyard, so he called down and told them about it. It was kind of like the all-seeing, all-knowing voice of God making a phone call. This man is so completely tuned in that a small red box where it shouldn’t be immediately catches his eye. His family has been in the area for something like 800 years, and you can tell that this is his home terroir – that he is as much a part and product of this place as the wines.

Although he and his family live in town, they have a house near the vineyards that they lived in until his wife was pregnant with their third child and said it was time to live closer to other people. They still go there sometimes on weekends or for parties, and they have a tasting room on the ground floor in a part of the building that is from the late 1800s. It’s always interesting to see how they deal with getting electricity around – there were wires all along the top of the walls. He’d brought bread and we tasted through 7 wines, 3 from Montsant and 4 from Priorat. Have I mentioned yet that if you want to say your wine is from the Priorat DOQ your grapes must be there through the whole process – growing, fermenting, aging, bottling – and it’s the same for Monsant DO. So he has wineries in both areas. His son, by the way, is the winemaker, but Sr C believes his son’s job is much easier because dad is doing 80-90% of the winemaker’s job by providing the best possible fruit. All of the wines were wonderful. His white, a 50/50 blend of white Grenache, was the reason that viognier was accepted as an allowable grape in the DOQ. He also had the only rose we’ve tasted here, an easy drinking syrah which was a very dark rose – I’ve seen some 2007 Oregon pinot noirs that were barely darker colored. I loved the top of the line Montsant, the Masia Esplanes, which was something like 36 euros a bottle. But all the wines were really, really good, and if I hadn’t already had a bottle of wine in my backpack we would have gotten one for sure. Some are available in the US, so that will have to do.

At this point Ania needed to take off for an appointment, so Sr C took us to the Marçà-Falset train station, which has a restaurant. We had a nice conversation in our broken Spanish about the rest of our trip and some of his favorite things to see in Barcelona, which he really did call Barthelona. We got there about 13:00 and our train was at 15:00, so we had plenty of time for a leisurely lunch. It was some of the best food we’ve had here, and we’ve had some very good food. I had the hazelnut soup and a stuffed eggplant that tasted like moussaka and rice that smelled like Sr C’s vineyard, and Dave had a spinach scramble and beautiful fried anchovies.

There wasn’t really a ticket window or anything there, but Dave had bought our tickets last night and Quima had printed them out, so that was all good. We were a little nervous about getting on the train, but just before it came there was an announcement confirming that it was on track 1 and reminding us to cross track 2 carefully, and we did and it came and we got on and there was a nearly empty luggage rack in the nearly empty car, so it was as easy as can be and we had a smooth ride to Barcelona. The train is what they call a regional express, meaning it goes about 45 mph and stops at every station along the way. It was very comfortable and we were glad we chose to take the train rather than a taxi.

The train runs right along the coast around Tarragona, so there was the ocean and palm trees and what we assumed was a children’s playground which had teepees for that true Mediterranean experience. I love taking the trains in Europe – it’s generally very easy, and you feel kind of like a local because most of the folks on the train are. And you get to see cool scenery, and in this case they went through the mountains rather than over them so I don’t feel queasy. And I got caught up on writing. We got off the train and even found the exit that’s on the same street as our hotel, about 4 blocks away. When we walked in, Hakim at the front desk started his greeting and then his face broke into a big smile and he said “It’s you! Welcome back!” Hakim helped us a lot during the shipping fiasco and is a great guy.

Our most pressing need now is a Laundromat, so we went to try and find one, but it turned out to be a dry cleaner and just as expensive as our hotel. By now it was almost 7 and I realized I was starving, which is bad enough at home but really bad in a place you don’t know. As often happens, I was too hungry to be able to make a decision about what to do, and started to want to turn in circles. Dave was very good and patient and talked me into looking at several places, and eventually we found one that spoke to me. It was called Loria, and it was exactly what we needed. In the corner there was a British man teaching colloquial English to three Barcelonians, and there were some families, and wines by the glass on a big chalkboard. We had some very interesting food, including beef carpaccio with rocket and foie gras, a big salad with a spicy horseradish dressing and semi-dried tomatoes, and my favorite, the “avocado hummus”, which we now know is the way they translate guacamole to English. They had wonderful chandeliers made of silverware hanging on strings of twine from bicycle wheels, and the wine list was actually a wall with shelves where you picked out the wine. I would go there again.

Then we came back to the hotel and Hakim printed us two maps of where Laundromats are. We got back to the hotel at about 8:30, which is just when the Barcelonians are starting to think about dinner, but we have been going flat out for three weeks now and it’s time to wind down with a nice cup of tea before an early bedtime and a what we hope will be a slow start tomorrow morning.

By the way, if you find Dave wandering around looking for his heart, you can remind him that he left it in the Priorat. Mine may be there too.

One last thing. We found out that the double LL is pronounced kind of like a soft l followed by “ye”. It’s almost as hard for us as it is for a Frenchman to say owl.