I stop at the delicious headline of the interview to the We eat –my favourite supplement in the world– in the comic Raquel Hervás. The interview is in Camarasa, owned by Francesc Macià, where the shoe shop Padeví used to be (a place so beautiful that, if you go in, you think you're in New York). The headline reads: "To know if a wine is good, you have to look at the depth of the hole in the bottle." This "advice", she explains, was given to her by her father: "The deeper the hole, the better the wine, because it is made so that the sommelier can pick it up better."
This phrase from Raquel's father, who was a farmer and cultivated vineyards, says many wise things. To start with, it speaks of the value that is given to the bottle, unintentionally. A study was done, not long ago, in which two empty bottles were given to "non-experts" and they were asked which of the two they thought contained the best wine and, therefore, "more expensive." Invariably, without meaning to, they pointed to the bottle that was heavier. They didn't do it consciously. It would be the equivalent, perhaps, in hardback books compared to paperbacks.
That Raquel's father thinks that if the sommelier can hold the bottle better, he will serve that wine better, with more ceremony, also seems wonderful to me, because it tells us things about the value of service. He does it from the part of the earth. He thinks that the one who has planted, pruned, cared for and harvested bottles in a certain way, to send a message to the one who removes the cork, sniffs it, checks that the glass is spotless and, then, takes the bottle by putting his finger in its bottom, or maybe not, he is going by style, and serves it properly.
There are phrases, like this one, that make you think that you know who said them. I think I know him, Raquel's father, polished, methodical, perhaps mischievous, knowing what each thing is worth. I really like this unknown gentleman, who has passed on his love of wine to his daughter, uniting, quite naturally, two worlds: those who fill the bottles and those who empty them.
