Immersed in wine

The magic of wine

No other food prod­uct has in­serted it­self into so many dif­fer­ent areas, while cre­at­ing a par­al­lel world with its own lan­guage that goes be­yond the con­sump­tion of the prod­uct it­self. What is it about wine that other prod­ucts don’t have? “What it has is magic,” says Xavi Fornos, di­rec­tor of Vin­seum, the Mu­seum of Wine Cul­tures of Cat­alo­nia, in Vi­lafranca del Penedès. He at­trib­utes wine with a so­cial­is­ing power, which along with its re­la­tion­ship with the land and the land­scape, make it a supremely cul­tural phe­nom­e­non. At Vin­seum, an in­sti­tu­tion that is be­com­ing a bench­mark for wine cul­ture in Eu­rope, the focus goes be­yond ex­plain­ing how wine is made to show all its many as­pects, which Fornos refers to as its “cul­tural, his­tor­i­cal, an­thro­po­log­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions that help ex­plain us as a so­ci­ety.”

The di­rec­tor of Vin­seum re­views the his­tory of this wine cul­ture. “The first tribal chiefs of an­cient civil­i­sa­tions were the only ones who had di­rect ac­cess to a prod­uct that stim­u­lated a high state of con­scious­ness,” he says. Later, the con­sump­tion of wine be­came more gen­eral, not least be­cause it was safer than drink­ing water, it is a good source of calo­ries, and it is a prod­uct that does not go off quickly. “As wine has for cen­turies been part of our daily lives, it means so­ci­ety has con­structed a story about wine,” says Fornos. In fact, a quick search on the in­ter­net turns up over 1,280 proverbs in Cata­lan with wine as the main con­cept, show­ing the im­por­tance of the prod­uct in the coun­try’s his­tory.

The di­rec­tor of the Vi­lafranca mu­seum evokes An­cient Greece, where philoso­phers ar­gued that wine was es­sen­tial for philo­soph­i­cal di­a­logue, a tra­di­tion that Chris­tian­ity would adopt by mak­ing wine a cen­tral el­e­ment of its liturgy. Wine also played an im­por­tant role in the Mid­dle Ages, es­pe­cially in monas­ter­ies. The monastery in Poblet, for ex­am­ple, had its own win­ery where the monks kept wine pro­duc­tion alive.

Today’s boom

In the 19th cen­tury, due to the process by which it was made, what was then called cham­pagne and now is known as cava was bot­tled, but local winer­ies in Cat­alo­nia tra­di­tion­ally sold wine si­phoned out of bar­rels. Yet how wine was seen in Cat­alo­nia fun­da­men­tally changed with the re­turn of democ­racy in the 1970s, ex­plains Fornos. Wine came to be seen as part of the Cata­lan iden­tity and so began a re­cov­ery of the wine­mak­ing tra­di­tion. “What came first was an un­der­stand­ing that qual­ity would be far more im­por­tant than quan­tity. This long process started in the eight­ies, began to have an im­pact on the mar­ket in the nineties, and from 2000 on it be­came es­tab­lished.” The main ex­am­ple is the trans­for­ma­tion of Pri­o­rat, in which young en­tre­pre­neurs drew on the re­gion’s unique con­di­tions to begin mar­ket­ing se­lect wines that turned Pri­o­rat into one of the world’s most pres­ti­gious wine­mak­ing re­gions.

With wine now in bot­tles iden­ti­fied by unique la­bels, a new phase opened up in which the wine­grower needed a story to help sell that bot­tle. “It is not only fam­ily and tra­di­tion, but also the land and this pres­ti­gious patina that wine has com­pared to other agri-food prod­ucts that have been used to con­struct sto­ries that, thanks to in­sti­tu­tions like Vin­seum, can be rig­or­ously doc­u­mented,” says the di­rec­tor.

There is still more work to be done to fur­ther grow the con­sump­tion of Cata­lan wines, but the story that wine is an in­trin­sic part of Mediter­ranean cul­ture is an added el­e­ment of at­trac­tion that helps de­fine and sell the prod­uct. What’s more, the ex­port of Cata­lan wines to more than 140 coun­tries has helped strengthen “the pride that we are a coun­try of great wines”.

“We are liv­ing in an ex­cit­ing time,” says Ruth Troy­ano, who is not only a som­me­lier but also a jour­nal­ist spe­cial­is­ing in wine tourism and wine com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and who for years has ob­served the sec­tor from var­i­ous per­spec­tives. “Never be­fore have there been such well-trained wine­mak­ers,” she says. “We can also do wine ar­chae­ol­ogy to en­sure the fu­ture of oenol­ogy with cen­tres, such as Vitec, the Falset Wine Tech­nol­ogy Park.”

Look­ing to the fu­ture, Troy­ano iden­ti­fies wine tourism as the best way to pro­mote wine. “Who­ever cre­ated the wine opens the doors of his home to you. You don’t take away just a bot­tle of wine, you take away a story,” she says. The wine ex­pert adds that a sec­tor that is often cliquish, “needs to open up and at­tract new au­di­ences.” An ex­am­ple is the suc­cess of mix­ing wine with other ac­tiv­i­ties, such as com­bin­ing yoga with wine, or ini­tia­tives like those of Celler Molí de Rué in Vine­bre, which has re­cov­ered the Lo Roget la­goon and now com­bines sail­ing on the Ebre River with a visit to the win­ery. “It’s about mak­ing tast­ings more emo­tional. Wine tast­ings are al­ready about emo­tions, but it’s also about bring­ing to­gether plea­sures,” she adds.