To the health of the winegrowers and winegrowers

I call my friend Jordi Crusellas, who makes grapes for the Artés cooperative, in Bages, when I hear that there has been a fire in his area. He answers me, distressed, from the tractor, and immediately sends me a video of the flames licking his picapoll vineyard. The vineyard acted as a firebreak. And that's how it happened with the Empordà fires a few years ago, too: the vineyards (la Garbet, in Peralada, Anna Espelt's...) were natural firebreaks. "I was stunned," he explains to me later, with a little more calm, "at how the flames jumped the vineyard and continued on the other side. Thanks to the vineyard, the fire was not so virulent and aggressive".

The forest, if it can, swallows everything. It will eat an abandoned vineyard, an unworked field. It will do so with all its weapons; the invasive species that have driven out the native ones and the arrogance of years and years of dirt, uncontrolled growth and bottles and papers thrown by the lentisk thieves. The vineyard tidies up. And when we say that a glass of wine is landscape, we are also saying this. That these resilient vines, which were already here before us and which, with a little luck, will still be here after us, are our salvation, apart from being the enjoyment of the most intelligent. When we don't feel like paying more than six euros for a bottle of wine, when we don't buy the cooperative's picapoll, because we are into hops and lately sake, we are also condemning our small plot of land, which we call "sea and mountain", to be only healthy as the pretentious ones say).

The Catalan winery fighting forest fires with wine