Julià Guillamon: "When I was little, the vineyards were pine forests"

Julià Guillamon (Barcelona, ​​1962) keeps about ten empty bottles at home. The writer and critic of The Vanguard He copied the idea from an exhibition that the National Library of Spain dedicated to Camilo José Cela, in which the bottles, mostly antique ones, that the Galician writer had decided to keep were displayed. Guillamon has published around twenty books – the latest of which, Scrapers (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2026), has just arrived in bookstores—in which many topics coexist, including, inevitably, wine.

On the flap of Wine and gasoline (Vibop, 2020) says that you had a vineyard in Vila-rodona. Is that true or is it already part of the book's fantastical apparatus?

— That's true. My grandmother was from Vila-rodona. She inherited a house and had owned quite a few vineyards. She sold them all and kept one. After several attempts, I ended up owning it. Some relatives were looking after it, and I was excited about the idea.

Did you get to taste their wine?

— They made wine for the village cooperative. But I really enjoyed going to the Vila-rodona fair. It was a lot of fun, because it was an agricultural fair. Compared to Arbúcies, Vila-rodona is much more rustic, much more rural. The world of vineyards there has been preserved.

And in Arbúcies?

— There had been a long tradition. When we had the inn, I'd seen them crushing grapes in the street. But above all, there was something fascinating here. In Arbúcies, everyone is obsessed with mushrooms. And when people went mushroom hunting, they'd say, "Let's go to so-and-so's vineyard." And we'd go to so-and-so's vineyard, and so-and-so's vineyard was a pine forest. In all the vineyards that had existed, they'd planted pine trees. So, when I was a child, vineyards were pine forests.

In his book he invents the almost mythological figure of the Labeler.

— It's the delightful chaos of the world of labels. I once worked for the Moritz brewery. They had a wine bar and wanted to create a magazine. They wanted to do something educational and explained to us how a French wine label worked—I can't remember the name now. I once did something incredibly fun with my friend Daniel Vicente, who owns Celler Can Dani on Travessera de Gràcia: we celebrated the Floral Games of Wine.

Floral Games of Wine?

— Dani and I always laughed at the labels. We took the labels from the bottles and made the three awards: Flor Natural, Englantina de Oro, and Viola de Oro y Plata. I think it was the first time they were published in The Vanguard two completely different articles in Catalan and in Castilian, because the wines that had won the Catalan Games were not the same as those that had won the Castilian Games.

And what criteria did they use?

— The most eccentric won. Some people do really outlandish things just to get attention. But I think there are wonderful labels and some really good people. I worked in a studio where JJ Bertran was. He's amazing. You see things and you think: how brilliant, what imagination.

Are they more serious about this in France?

— Because they have a long-established tradition. It's not like here, where brands, wineries, and vineyards each have three days. You take a Bordeaux winery and it turns out it's been around since the 19th century. However, here they have four days, and since there's no tradition, they just make whatever label they want. There, on the other hand, they try to emphasize that it "has been around forever." And, therefore, there are much stricter rules.

Why did he write a book about wine?

— Perucho and I were very good friends. It was Montse Serra's [from Vibop] idea for the Perucho Year [2020]. Perucho had written a lot about gastronomy with Néstor Luján. We started reading everything he had written about wine and realized he had written very little, not enough for a book, and so I said: well, let's make it up. And that's how the idea of ​​creating fictional stories came about.

Perucho speaks of some wines that "They are not only drunk, but also bitten, eaten, and chewed."

— They all wrote a lot like that. And they were very funny. Both Néstor [Luján] and Perucho became very good friends with the Galicians, as did José María Castroviejo and Álvaro Cunqueiro. And they all did very mischievous things. Cunqueiro and Castroviejo even came up with a recipe for how to cook a mermaid: very easy, he says, the bottom part like a fish and the top part like big game. In He Spanish cookbook Luján and Perucho's recipe for how to cook the cat comes out twice – twice!

In the book you ask yourself who these authors were writing for, who their audience was…

— Especially for them, because he was having a great time. He was having a blast. Néstor [Luján] had a section in Destination which was called Eat wellAnd there he was talking about how to cook hare à la royaleBut how will you do it, hare? à la royale At home? It was the opposite of a cookbook. But that's what the world of gastronomy and the great chefs we have now have.

That?

— There's an element, let's say, of fantasy, of fascination. That's why Luján spoke of a hare. à la royalewho must have eaten twice. But that thing about illusion… These were people who came from the 1940s. When they were twenty years old, they practically didn't eat at home. They came from humble families and, suddenly, they entered this world.

What was their relationship like with them?

— Damn, they were so much fun. I learned a lot from Perucho about that fantastic thing of wanting to conquer the world, of knowing how to savor life. In the same way that he praised the hare. à la royale He talked about tortilla with juice. He mixed things from the highest school with popular dishes. In fact, he came to my family's inn in Arbúcies two or three times. The first time, my mother went out of her way to make Mr. Perucho happy and all that, and she made him a fricandó. She made it without sofrito, with the tomato, the onion, and everything raw. Perucho found it so good, and so easy to digest, that he wrote an article about it. Maria Mota's KitchenAnd my mother was forever fond of Mr. Perucho and his article. He was very generous. He had that vibrant, lively side, and food and drink were part of something social and festive.

What was life like at the inn in Arbúcies?

— Like a spa town straight out of Stefan Zweig's time. Ladies from the Eixample district, very well-dressed, would come. There were also people from Mataró who would spend a whole month in the village during the summer. People went to follow the springs, to take the waters. It was very 19th-century tourism. And since there were a lot of older people, I got used to talking a lot. It was an extraordinary observation point for me. You saw all sorts of behaviors, you met very diverse people. Everyone who ran around had a story or a tale, like Mr. Kapralik, who was a very tall Jewish man with a stateless person's passport. It was August, it was unbearably hot, and he was wearing a coat and hat. We had the idea that he was a Jewish concentration camp survivor… At the inn, you realized that the world didn't end with your day-to-day experiences. That there was a past.

In Scrapers (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2026) also features the world of the inn. And wine.

— At the inn, customers usually drank wine with lunch. Some drank it with lunch and dinner. But there was one who drank it with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And he always joked, "Kid, this bottle had a hole in it." In the book there's a story called The perforated bottlesThe narrator is obsessed with reduplication, that thing where they take bags of potato chips and put ten less in. And he remembers the joke about the bottle and the hole that this man made. He examines the bottle and finds the hole.

The inn wasn't the only place wine entered the house. Her grandfather had also worked at the airport.

— My grandfather had been a waiter at the Gran Café Barcelona. When it closed, he went to work at the airport, where there was a really good restaurant… The funny story we had at home was that my grandfather had served the Beatles, because they had gone to this restaurant. My father used to tell me, "You should know that your grandfather said the Beatles were hooligans because they put their feet on the table" [laughs]. So, at home there were always batches of wines and liquors that they gave my grandfather at the airport. Strange drinks. Now people don't realize it, but back then there weren't any wines.

As?

— Wines weren't like they are now. People would go to the winery, buy Priorat, and, finding it too harsh, mix it with sweet wine. There were table wines, which were very simple and occupied a space now taken over by beer. Some more refined customers would have special drinks delivered, and I had to go to Barcelona to buy them, to good wine shops like Quilez. But there weren't many brands. In fact, Perucho kept the labels of exceptional wines. It shows how few there were. As a young man, I experienced the initial moment when people started saying, "Oh, they have that brand or that one." But that was in the '80s. What we're experiencing now is just yesterday.

And how do you see this world today?

— I see there's some concern that people aren't drinking wine. I'm very observant, and I pay attention when I go to restaurants. In Arbúcies, I often go to the Hotel Montsoriu because it reminds me so much of home, and the day they open a bottle of wine is a celebration. People drink water or soft drinks because we've all caught this habit of running, and we'll probably keep running until we're 80, and if you're drinking three beers a day, you can't do it. Then there's much less social interaction. And besides, the breweries are huge. The beer brands are giants, while the wineries are small. Wine has become a specialty, something for experts. Something like what's happened with literature.