The peasant’s wine
I find that it’s really the smell that’s missing. When visiting wineries in places such as Napa Valley, outside of harvest time, there is no smell of wine. It’s as if it’s been sucked out of existence in an effort to try and show, “Why no, this isn’t that filthy, dirty thing known as agriculture. It’s a beautiful craft. Now, that Cab Sauv will be $95 please.”
But walking in to a “vi de pagès” cellar such as those of Calonge, Baix Èmporda in Catalonia, the smell is there. It hits you full in the face with a roundhouse bouquet of sulfur, ambient mold, earth, wood, and this general tang of oldness in the cellar. It’s simply beautiful and it’s in a place like this where you feel the wine being made seeping in to your every orifice.
Of course the problem with “vi de pagès” or “peasant wine” as it directly translates from Catalan in to English is the fact that it’s utterly and totally unregulated. Ask any of the fully regulated cellars in the area and they’ll pull no punches and outright tell you that it’s “illegal wine”. Admittedly to some extent, it is.
This approach to winemaking is really nothing new. In fact, it’s the old way of making wine as in centuries old. You crush grapes, toss them in a barrel, let them ferment, let them sit a while longer, bottle it, and then you have your wine. The problem is that this is an inherently dirty way to go about making wine. It’s hard to control, hard to sanitize, and is wildly unpredictable.
This is in great contrast to modern winemaking methods where the entire cellar is heavily sterilized, all components of the wine are carefully monitored, and quality (ie safety) is strictly monitored. The end result is a very uniform, regular product that government bodies deem is safe for us to put in our bodies.
So why on earth would you want to drink this peasant-y substance if it’s so precariously made? Well, for once thing, there’s the price. Because these are non-certified cellars, the wine can’t be sold in stores, thus you have to buy it directly from the folks making it and it comes at a very reasonable price that’s usually around 2€ a bottle.
But, economics aside, it’s a chance to taste wine that is living a bit dangerously. It’s true, you need to select your cellar carefully and buy only from those who you’re sure are making a quality product. Once you do find one of these, then you’ll find upon opening a bottle, it’s a wild ride. The wines can be earthy and all over the place, but what you’re tasting is the actual, unadulterated grape, let loose like a drunken elephant on Spring Break.
Then there are those weird ass grapes that no one ever hears about because the certified cellars can’t use them. These peasant winemakers can and do use them, partly out of tradition, but also out of the fact they’ve been growing on their family properties for generations.
Ever taste Rooster Balls? Or how about about Jaqué? I have and it’s a tasty grape in addition to the fact it’s one of the very, very few European vines that can resist the phylloxera pest that destroyed a majority of the vineyards in the 19th century. These winemakers are preserving a bit of history that is otherwise lost due to most of these grapes deemed as “not productive enough” to be worth growing them by the larger wineries. In their defense though, if you’re working to make a certified wine, it will cost a lot more per bottle and you can’t muck about with a grape that doesn’t put out.
Ultimately, this style of wine is most assuredly not for everyone. If you like your wines to be the same from one bottle to the next, you probably won’t get that in this style of wine. Or, if you want to buy a wine that is deemed to be of a certain quality level, again, this isn’t your bottle of choice.
For those want to live a little, it’s worth a taste. It’s a tradition that, despite its adamant supporters, is dying out because we live in a modern world where predictable sadly is delectable.
