Montse Molla Comas: "The name 'red wine' is from the Franco era, when they didn't like to say 'red wines', but in Calonge we have always called it 'red wine'"

CalongeI interview Montse Molla at the family home, at Mas Molla, in Calonge. She is harvesting Claudia plums and, soon, grapes, now at the end of August. They have given a guided tour to a group of Dutch people that ends with tastings, which her mother has prepared. At Mas Molla everything is running smoothly and they are calm after the scare they had at the beginning of July. The Gavarres fire made them suffer like never before. They saw it start themselves, the three sisters, while they were picking peaches. Montse's sister, Núria Molla, went viral with a video that 3Cat broadcast in which she explained that "the Gavarres are a powder keg, that everything is dry and abandoned, that it is a shame". She also asked that we change our way of life, that we should live like our grandparents, simply.

Has lived your whole family in Mas Molla de Calonge?

— The oldest document we have is from 1338, meaning we go back to the Late Middle Ages, with the family member Arnau Molla de la Riera. They were remença peasants, which means they were not the owners of the land, but used it and had to pay a part of it to the lord. Specifically, we depended on the cathedral of Girona.

Is there a moment when everything changes?

— Our ancestor fought in the War of the Remences to change this situation. We know this because the document of the revolt is preserved in the Girona archive, and he appears in it as a rebel. The Remences were the first syndicalist organization, and the archive document is a World Heritage Site. The war changed the established order and the way of organizing; it ended in 1458 with the arbitration award of Guadalupe, which gave freedom to the peasants to work and sell their products. We know of other farmhouses that have not remained in our family's hands; ours, yes. We continue to be farmers here and we continue to do direct sales.

What do you sell at the farm?

— Fruit: cherries, apricots, peaches, and now a Claudia prune. With the grapes from the vineyards, we make natural wines. Look, over there you see our press. We harvest the grapes. We have old, Catalan varieties that are little known.

What kind now?

— These are names you may not have heard of. We have aveller grapes, ximoi, picapoll, moscatell, beba, black moscatell, roig, molí. The black moscatell we have is very special. We conducted a genetic study with the Rovira i Virgili University and the University of La Rioja and identified a total of fifty-six different varieties, fifteen of which are unique. We are therefore talking about enormous biodiversity.

Why do you think it happened?

— Because we have always stayed at the farmhouse, because we have always carried out the same activity as our ancestors. We have not entered any designation of origin, nobody has told us that we had to pull up vines, nor have they recommended that we plant any others to have more quality. We have continued doing what our grandparents did.

Do you know how great-grandfathers and grandfathers worked the vineyard?

— They took the best-adapted plants and grafted them back. They made an intuitive selection: they reproduced the most beautiful vines. So when we talk about a xarel·lo of ours, we are talking about a xarel·lo that is two or three hundred years old. Think that Mas Molla is seven hundred years old! We haven't had to go to nurseries to buy vines, because we have them from always.

At mas we make natural wines.

— I studied enology and learned to make a technically perfect wine. You learn to control it, to know what is happening at all times, to intervene if necessary. On the other hand, I am doing the exact opposite of what they taught me. Wines are made in an interventionist way, in the sense that everything is controlled, and what is not liked is adjusted. Then, the result is perfect, by-the-book wines that go onto the international market. I know how to do all of that, but at home we want to do the exact opposite.

How is natural wine made?

— We harvest the grapes. You see that we have vineyards next to the house; we press them, put the must into the vats, and once it is there, it ferments spontaneously. I don't control the yeast, which is the first thing they taught us in enology school. In our studies, they taught us to add sulfites, to inoculate a yeast. We put it into the vats and the must ferments on its own.

The wine is made in the sun, isn't it?

— Yes. I have the temperature controlled, the bocoys, I don't need to complicate my life. If I have a yeast that selects itself naturally and works well for me and makes good wines, why should I do it any other way? If it had gone wrong, I would have changed the way I do it, but I've been doing it for many years and it always turns out well.

How many wines do you make?

— As many barrels as I can fill. The resulting wine from each barrel is different. In one barrel, fermentation can last thirty days; in another, forty. The one that ferments for more days will consume all the sugar, it will be dry. The one that does it for less will be sweeter. Depending on the vintage, everything also changes. Heatwaves, rain, make the grapes different, and the entire subsequent process, too.

What do all these names I see written on the boots mean?

— They are the names of the people who come to buy wine from us. I put them there because they would come and say to me: "I want the same wine I bought the other day." They didn't know which cask it was from, so the method is to write it with chalk on the cask itself. All this comes from my father's time, when they would say to him: "Save me a wine just like the one I bought." Then we write it down so we know which cask it is from. It can also happen that we taste the wines together, and they say to me: "This is the wine I like; save me fifty bottles." So I write their name on the cask.

Do they buy you fifty bottles of 'cop'?

— Or more. Look, now this boot is empty. I have everything bottled up, and among the bottles I have a paper with the list of bottles that the people who told me are keeping. This is my spreadsheet; cutting-edge technology [laughs].

Wines do not have labels.

— No, because I give them all the information when they come to buy the bottles. The label is me.

How many bottles have you sold this year?

— I made fifty thousand; I must have sold about forty thousand.

Therefore, no wine stored. You must not know what the wine crisis is.

— We sell everything every year. I have noticed that before a single client bought more wine. Before people drank more wine at home; now the same quantity of bottles is bought by different people.

Is it always the same?

— It's curious; I have people from all my life, who know what farm wine is, and also new clients, who are looking for zero-kilometer products. They are people who are interested in natural foods.

I'm glad to hear that because I'm very tired of hearing that wine is not drunk and why it is not drunk.

— For me it's more work to sell them because we do everything ourselves: we make them, we explain everything to them, we let them taste them, and, at the end of the day, I may have explained everything a few times, but we sell them all.

Are all the wines you make red?

— No, we make them of all colors. Whites, pinks, and reds. Because here, in Calonge, we call them red wines. The name of red wine is from the Franco era, when they didn't like to say red wines, but in Calonge, in our home, we have always called it red wine, and we stick to it. Oh, and we also have ancestral wines, which I call accidental, because they bubble.

At what prices do you sell them?

— Between two and eight, the most expensive. And we want to maintain these prices because we want wine to be on the table. If we turn wine into a luxury, then what will we have on our tables? Coca-colas? Soft drinks? Wine, olive oil, and bread must always be on the table.

At the beginning of July there was the fire in Les Gavarres. And your sister Núria made us all emotional. We have to live simply, like our grandparents, she told us. I saw the burnt mountain when I entered your house.

— We were picking peaches and we saw a small column of fire. We continued working on it, and after twenty minutes, we saw that the fire was serious, that it was reaching La Bisbal, and then we told ourselves that in no time we would have it at home. We were very nervous. The fire was approaching our farmhouse, we saw it coming, we were preparing to fight it and suddenly, a stroke of luck: the wind diverted it. But the issue is that Les Gavarres are abandoned. The fault was not the spark from the grinder that escaped; the fault is the entire system, which sees us only as a postcard image, and nothing is done in this part of the country. I know it's complicated to find a solution because nature also needs to have a part that is not human intervention, but before there was agriculture and livestock that lived off the forest. Now there are private property plots that even the owners wouldn't find with a map. That is to say, there is not a single solution, there are many, but one must leave Barcelona, one must tread the land. And we want to be heard, because there is a great disconnection between Barcelona and the rest of the country.