The Architecture of Wine

Most Americans and Brits who enjoy wine drink French or California wines. Some, who read the reviews, have sipped the occasional Rioja or Ribera del Duero. And some who follow the latest trends know about the wines of Priorat which have finally put Catalunya on the wine-lover’s map. The Priorat is about an hour away from me. The Terra Alta (highlands), yet another wine-growing region, is even closer, so, being a believer in buying locally, I drink their undiscovered wines the most.

While the Terra Alta is hilly, Priorat is comprised of steep, rocky terrain full of slate, and that is what gives the wine its distinctive flavors. There are virtually no flat fields so the vineyards are all terraced into the hillsides. The wineries in both these areas tend to be small enterprises, most of them harvesting and making their wines by hand.

There is no real city in either Priorat or the Terra Alta. The biggest settlements are small towns like Falset (population 2,600), and mostly you find only small villages. In almost every one of these small villages you find a building – usually in the modernist style – housing the village’s wine cooperative. In Pinell de Brai (population 1,075) you find the Catedral del Vi (Cathedral of Wine).

Designed in 1917 by the Catalan architect Cèsar Martinell i Brunet, a disciple of Antoni Gaudi, in the modernist (Catalan art nouveau) style, this cooperative has always been a working building, a winery and olive press, and is made of simple materials, brick and stone. What makes it stand out from the other modernist cooperatives is the ceramic frieze across its façade and the elegant parabolic arches inside, typical of Catalan modernist architecture, but not always so grand. It is these arches that give one the feeling of being in a cathedral.

Martinell designed several wine cooperatives in the area, all of them notable and noticeable when you drive through the villages where they are located. The one in Pinell de Brai is perhaps the most splendid of them all, although the village is no bigger or richer than any of its neighbors. Evidently the people of this village were somehow inspired in 1917 to make something exceptional. The members of all the cooperatives spent more money than they needed to in order to have these utilitarian buildings built. They could have opted for something very basic and utilitarian. But no, these people, in one village after another, chose to erect something more expensive, something lasting, something very beautiful.

German clock in Spain

This is my new clock. Manuel bought it for me last week at an antique fair in Reus. Who said the Spanish don't do antiques? I did. He bought it from an Englishman who lives and has his business in Germany. My new beauty is a German clock from around 1930 and looks a lot like the one I lost when we moved to Spain.  I say I lost it but it must have been stolen.  It was the only box that wasn't delivered to us by the shipping company. The chimes are beautiful, and someday I will be able to ignore them and sleep through the night.

In the Middle of Nowhere

I live here, in this pretty village. Well, actually I live near this village. It's a fishing port but you can find a better selection of fish for cheaper in a nearby inland village. And actually the best view of the village is from where I took this photo. From other locations it isn’t that pretty. But the coast here is somewhat pleasing. The development is minimal, there are pine and olive trees, small cliffs, small coves, the sun shines often. Even so, this is not the place that moves my spirit.

I live about three kilometers outside the village. That’s a 45 minute walk or a ten minute drive on a small country road that passes through olive orchards. Sounds idyllic, but sadly, it isn’t.

I will try not to go on and on about Spanish drivers. Let's just say they are aggressive and inept. Ubiquitous aggressive inept driving makes it bad enough to be out and about while enclosed in an armored vehicle, like a car, and another to be out there unprotected. To walk down that small country road passing through olive orchards, winding, curving, and dipping your way to the village with no armor is to risk your life. One problem of ineptitude is that most drivers don’t stay to the right on these small roads. They drive in the middle and if there is a curve to the right, even a blind curve, they take it all the way over on the left. Same for right turns at intersections or into driveways. The speed limit on that little road is 30 kilometers per hour. Most cars go 60. So I take that walk to the village every now and then, but keep my ears pealed for oncoming cars so I can step aside if needed. And I never ride a bike because at my age, it isn’t safe to fall while trying to avoid being hit by a car.

The fact is that I didn’t come to live in Spain in order to be out in the country. I came to live in the metropolis of Barcelona – one of the world’s great cities. And one of the great attractions to living in the city was that I wasn’t going to need a car. I could get around by foot and public transportation and so I would be less of an environmental burden on the world. But life happened, things changed, and here I am, out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by olive trees and inept drivers.

Becoming Extinct

Some time back I read No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod with an online book group. To me, this tale of a Scottish clan in Cape Breton, Canada is more than the saga of a family, it is about the extinction of a species – the species in this case being a culture. I find this phenomenon just as sad and disturbing as when it is the extinction of a species of animal. A culture with its history, language, stories, literature, music, food, way of being and thinking, cannot be revived once its members are no longer members and no longer speak the language and sing the songs. The thousands of cultures that make up our world are one of its greatest treasures and, in my opinion, deserve as much protection as turtles and owls and whales. Someone in the book group asked why Zulus and a couple of other groups were mentioned in the book. I think it was because they are also on the point of becoming extinct.

I live in Catalunya where the Catalans are doing their best not to become extinct. They are constantly fighting to have their language taught and used in the schools, used on commercial signs, used in court proceedings, used when they dub movies, so that it doesn’t become yet another dead language. They fight to have Catalan introduced as one of the many official languages of the European Union, and they fight to be able to have Catalan national teams play in international competitions, as do the Irish and Scots of Great Britain. These battles are fought with the government of Spain.

On 12 December 2009, many Catalan towns had a vote on whether or not they wanted Catalan independence from Spain. This vote was not an official referendum as that is illegal in Spain. It was merely put forth as a point of information. Even so, it was criticized and threatened with being declared illegal and legal actions taken. It doesn’t make much sense to me that in a democracy, people can’t have a referendum on something like that if they want it.

One hundred sixty-five towns held the unofficial non-referendum poll and they had an average of about 30% participation. That’s not bad for an unofficial poll. The highest turnout was in the Garrotxa, in the center of Catalunya. Two hundred thousand people voted all together and the vote was overwhelmingly yes for independence.

In No Great Mischief, when the narrator brings his brother Calum home at the end, there is no one to greet them as there had been on other occasions; there is no piper, and the policeman who stops them asks if they are the MacDonalds who make the hamburgers. Clearly the clan is in the process of disintegrating and soon there will be nothing left of the Highlanders in Cape Breton. Without that community, there soon will also be no Gaelic spoken in Canada, and all the songs and stories will also die out, except those that are written and saved for folkloric purposes, like those songs we saw performed on the museum website that one of the book group members sent around.

Pont del Diable

I think Tarragona’s Roman aqueduct might be the most beautiful structure I have ever seen. Known as El Pont del Diable or Devil’s Bridge, it is a surviving fragment of a longer aqueduct that once carried water, mostly at ground level, for over ten kilometers to the city. This section, about two miles outside the city, is a bridge crossing a small ravine and is made up of two rows of graceful arches, all made of golden stone, stacked one upon the other in the first century A.D. There are eleven arches on the bottom and twenty-five on top. It is 90 feet high, over 650 feet long, there are no fences or entry gates, no admission charge, no graffiti, no restraints, and visitors are free to walk across the top in the channel where water once flowed.
Even having seen photos beforehand, I didn’t have the real sense of size and context until I saw it in person. I don't understand why anyone would go to Disneyland when there are so many real fairy tales to see. The aqueduct is a piece of engineering as lovely as any work of art, and after two thousand years, it is just as beautiful as ever. There is something pleasingly perfect about it
Legend goes that the master builder was desperate to finish the elevated channel, having been hindered by high winds of the mistral Exasperated, he said that only the devil could build a bridge that would withstand a thousand years, and the devil responded with an offer of help. But he didn’t want to be paid in gold: he wanted the soul of whoever would be first to drink the water brought by the channel. The bridge was finished and the master builder sent across a thirsty donkey from the work crew in payment to the devil.

Dangers of a New Language

A little knowledge can be dangerous. One day three years ago, I read a headline in the newspaper Avui that said something about six dead from an attack of mosquitoes. What a strange thing. Must be somewhere in Africa, or maybe Mexico where they have those killer bees. Curious, I pressed on to discover that they were talking about six people dead in Iraq as a result of attacks on mosques, the plural for mosques being mesquites, while the plural for mosquitoes is mosquits. What is happening in Iraq is certainly no joke. I just glad I was home alone with my thoughts and did not make a complete fool of myself in public.

Sant Antoni

Today is Sant Antoni Abat (Saint Anthony the Abbot), patron saint of domestic animals and the day the Catalans haul out their animals and put them on parade. The day was grey and bleak, but I was determined, and, animal lover that I am, I went to the festival in nearby El Perello. I love the folk festivals here and haven't seen many lately, and this was just the fix I needed.

There were lots of horses, miniature horses, some mules, and some donkeys. They were all beautiful, some very decked out. Some of the riders had their horses prancing, almost dancing. Horses are so elegant.

I didn’t stay for the blessing of the animals at the church having been invited to friends for lunch. That is a very nice ceremony, when people bring up not just the bigger animals in the parade, but dogs, cats, parakeets, hamsters, what have you and the priest sprinkles them with holy water. I thought about taking Minnie, but decided that taking her would be more for me than for her, so I abandoned that idea. Minnie would be forever grateful if she knew.