Raquel Hervás: "To know if a wine is good, you have to look at the depth of the hole in the bottle"

You grew up between Murcia and Santa Coloma de Gramenet. Where did you start drinking your first glasses of wine?

— I left Santa Coloma when I was 10 or 11, so luckily for me, it was in Murcia that I first tried wine. Otherwise, I might have been worryingly precocious.

One of the festivals celebrated in your town of Caravaca, in Murcia, is the festival of the wine horses. Was your first contact with this world linked to the festival?

— I think so. The first times I tried wine were at these festivals. It is an important festival. In fact, it is included in the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and it is quite religious. It is framed in the story of a miracle that happened in the Middle Ages, when in a dispute between an Arab king and the Christians, water was transformed into wine. Obviously, in this case, what is said is mostly drunk. the wine of the cross, which is a wine of battle, in every sense. After two or three glasses, your head hurts, and I think you'll get a hangover before you even try it.

How did the transition from battle wine to more gastronomic glasses happen?

— My father loves wine a lot, and I think that he has influenced the fact that now in my house there are at least three or four good bottles for when guests come over. One piece of advice that Dad gave me, which I don't know if he was kidding me, is that to know if a wine is good you have to look at the depth of the hole in the bottle. He told me that the deeper the hole in the bottom of the bottle, the better the wine, because it is made so that the sommelier can hold it better. I don't believe him completely, but he is my father, who has spent a lot of time in the vineyard.

Have you dedicated yourself to it? In what sense?

— At home they are lifelong farmers and have a piece of land where there are vines, although it is very small. One day my parents decided to stop harvesting grapes to eat them and began to try their hand at making wine. In the end, both my father and my mother had already gone to harvest grapes when they were young. My mother, when she was 11 or 12, was taken out of school and taken to France, and my father went to Villarrobledo. Farming is very hard. I have not experienced it first hand, because I have no longer dedicated myself to it as a profession, but I have seen my parents and the entire generation of my uncles and grandparents being punished by the countryside. I would never go back, and neither would my parents. Going to the countryside is not about drinking a bottle of wine and writing four thoughts with an Olivetti.

Now you work in comedy, television, radio and live performances. In your work environment linked to the world of leisure and nightlife, what role does wine play?

— I think that as a society we have normalised alcohol and for some time now I have been more aware of this. Before I was even grateful when the audience came a little happy, because I thought that they would laugh more easily, but for some time now I have been thinking that in professions like mine, closely linked to the world of nightlife, it has become too normal for people to go drunk as a way of losing their inhibitions. Sometimes I have come across someone drunk in the audience during performances, and then I have the added task of trying to maintain the atmosphere of the performance and trying to manage that person...

What is the budget you are willing to spend on wine?

— Until I read Maria Nicolau say that the cheapest wine on the menu should defend itself, I always ordered the second cheapest. So as not to be seen as the most miserly. I think that in this industry there is something snobbish that makes you think that a good wine must be expensive, but I don't believe that expensive wines are the best wines.