With wine, the theory is clear: the hotter it gets, the more sugars the grapes can accumulate. Given that during fermentation these sugars will end up being transformed into alcohol, if it has been a year of great heatwaves, presumably the alcoholic strength of the wine will also be high. However, very alcoholic wines are not to everyone's taste, and even less so now that the heat is arriving. Faced with this, wineries are devising ways to also offer wines that significantly reduce alcohol, regardless of whether the vineyard has had to endure very high temperatures. Several Catalan wineries are already making wines or drinks that can be assimilated to wine, almost all of them white, ranging between 6% and 9.5% alcohol. They are an intermediate point between Mediterranean wines, with an alcohol content that can reach 15%-16%, and de-alcoholized wines, which become 0.0 if all the alcohol is removed. The aim is to respond to the trend of drinking less without giving up aroma and taste, which can diminish greatly in the processes to transform them into 0.0, and at the same time offer lower-alcohol wines without so much technological intervention.

It's urgent that we develop the desire to be taught how to go to the fishmonger's, the meat stall, the fruit and vegetable stand, to "choose and browse." We don't know how, and we don't know how because of the supermarkets, which offer us lettuce, peeled and cut carrots, farmed salmon, minced meat and potatoes in the form of hamburgers on shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays. We buy quickly, too quickly. We throw things away without guilt, too often. We live wrapped in shrink wrap. Without plastic on top, no food excites us.

I fully agree with the words of the director general of Incavi, reported by colleague Jordi Bes, speaking of the fact that wine consumption is stagnating. Wine needs "less solemnity and more shared emotion," says Joan Gené. And he also says that Catalan wine is at its peak, but that "one in five consumers doesn't know where the wine they're drinking comes from, and in the case of young people, it's one in four." He attributes, of course, this decline "to the growing pronouncements and policies promoted by governments and organizations, such as the WHO," which consider that "there is no alcohol consumption with zero risk to health."