Stars in His Eyes

by Martí Gironell

In the times of Julius Caesar, the wines of Penedès were famous in Roman banquets and throughout Europe. Millions of amphoras from the area were sent by sea from Tarragona to the capital of the empire.

  Observations: Try new varieties. Plant red and white varieties, and don’t limit yourself to macabeo, ull de llebre, garnatxa, and malvasia, which are the grapes the locals make their wines with.

  I’ve got a good feeling, Jean had told himself when he saw, on top of a hill some eight hundred feet above sea level, an old vineyard stretching out over clay soil, rocky, chalky, on a plot of around one hundred fifty-seven hectares—fifty-seven wooded, the other hundred arable. Only eighty were under cultivation, in the hands of a pair of tenant farmers with one mule and one goat.

  And then, on October 12, 1962, that good feeling materialized when he purchased Mas d’en Rovira in Torrelavit for 6 million pesetas. It was a common-sense choice, not one of Jean’s typical irrational impulses. Amerine cast the deciding vote. Before Jean bought the property, he’d sent some soil samples to UC Davis for analysis, to determine whether the varieties they hoped to plant would thrive in that soil. Once they’d gotten the green light, Jean Leon bought the land. They had put down 275,000 pesetas as a deposit, and now he was paying the remainder, and the property would be his.

  But not his alone.

  Spanish law didn’t allow foreigners to own more than twenty hectares of land, so, because of the size of the estate, Jean decided to register himself as the owner of the ancient home on the property and put everything else in the name of his brother, Paco, who lived in Vilafranca.

  Having his brother, Paco, there was a blessing and a curse: Jean needed him to purchase the land, but it meant placing his trust in a greenhorn, someone who had never seen a farm up close, knew not the first thing about soil, and had no idea how the wine business worked. Fortunately he wouldn’t be alone; Jaume Rovira, a young winemaker who had studied enology in Madrid, would be there to support him. Jean would be able to follow the progress of the winery from the US and would only need to go to Penedès a few times a year.

  The day after buying Mas d’en Rovira, Jean Leon got up very early to take a walk around his estate. Jaume was surprised to see him climbing the hill toward the vines. He left what he was doing to come out, greet him, and take him on a stroll through the property.

  Rovira was pleased to show Jean the distribution of the vines, the different varieties, and to take him into the heart of the vineyard. This was the place he would begin planting the strains of white and red grapes they’d decided on over the phone. Jaume was excited to put Jean’s suggestions into practice. Jean didn’t have much experience with wine on the production side, but his plans for Penedès were clear-sighted and revolutionary.

  Rovira reached into the vine shoots, the long, thin branches emerging from the trunk. He fingered one of the tendrils and then pulled off a cluster. Attached to a broad leaf was a shoot with a cluster of juicy berries, their pulp sweet, their skin yellow.

  “They look like pearls!” Jean Leon gawked, stroking them delicately with his thin white fingers.

  Rovira knelt down, and Leon followed suit. The enologist dug his hands into the earth and grabbed a handful of soil, letting it slip through his fingers.

  “These are poor soils,” Rovira said.

  “Are you saying the land isn’t good?”

  “Quite the opposite,” Rovira said reassuringly. “Like the farmers say, when the soil is rich and fertile, you plant vegetables. When it’s less so, you plant wheat or garlic. But when the soil looks like it has nothing left to offer, that’s when you plant your vineyard.”

  The two men walked up a path to a small, templelike shed piled high with tools, fabric, bags, and other items belonging to the young enologist. There, they took shelter from the sun, which was falling at an angle, sitting on the stone bench under the barely protruding roof of the shack. Rovira served them two glasses of wine from a pitcher.

  “I don’t know what anyone else has told you,” he said, gesturing across the surrounding fields, “but we have promising conditions here, and soil that can make a magnificent wine. Of course, we’ve got to have patience. You can’t rush the vines.”

  “With persistence and a little luck, I’m sure we can make it happen,” Jean Leon replied, excited by this new horizon before him. “There’s no doubt about it, you look at the world differently with a little wine in your stomach. And this one isn’t bad at all.”

  “Trust me, ours will be better!” Jaume assured him.

  “Good enough that people won’t just drink it, they’ll talk about it, too. I’m sure of it!”

  Jean Leon raised his glass in a sign of optimism, wishing the young man well. But instead of toasting, Jaume grew thoughtful.

  “Actually, people here are already talking about it.”

  “Why do you make that face, Jaume?” Leon asked with a touch of concern.

  The enologist didn’t move a muscle. He was concentrating. He watched the ripples on the surface of his wine, and with them, the sediment settling into the bottom of the glass.

  “A sediment of hatred and rancor . . . ,” Rovira murmured.

  “What do you mean?” Leon asked, knitting his brows.

  “These objections, they’re leaving a sediment of hatred and rancor,” he repeated bluntly, looking Leon in the eyes.

  “Objections?”

  “So to speak. The farmers, some are raising a stink,” Rovira said. “A lot of them don’t agree with what we’re trying to do here.”

  Leon felt great respect for the local winemakers, but he was going to do things his way, whether his neighbors and their laborers liked it or not. And he had Rovira’s education and experience with the land to help bring tradition and innovation together.

  Over the next several months, during the growing season, Rovira drew on every technique he knew to achieve good results. He scattered ash and oil on the vines so that, during pruning, the ash would fall into the clefts and protect the vines from frost. In the depths of winter—again, to avoid frost damage—he would spread manure across different parts of the vineyard, letting the steam from it radiate over the plants.

  These were ancient methods that had been handed down from generation to generation. Jaume had learned them from the people who lived on the land, and he wasn’t one to look down his nose at tradition. At the same time, he had studied enology in Madrid, he knew the science behind his work, and there were times when his ideas struck the neighboring farmers as madness. He thinned his crops mercilessly in the pursuit of better juice. Many treated the harvest like an act of fate and let the fields sit untouched for much of the year, but Jaume spent every waking hour in the vineyard, inspecting the soil, the fruit, the leaves. He was just a kid: when he met Jean, he hadn’t finished his degree, hadn’t done his year in the army, and had just gotten his feet wet at Can Nadal, a cava winery. But he was determined to make Mas d’en Rovira, which the new owner had dubbed Château Leon, the most sophisticated winery Spain had ever seen.

  CHAPTER 13

  When the summer of 1963 came, Jaume reminded Leon’s brother, Paco Carrión, of all the work that had to be done before harvest: plowing, digging, tilling, mulching, cleaning the trenches, culling, pulling up vines, pruning, training the vines, replanting, grafting, sulfur treatments, scattering manure . . .

  “All this work in the fields means hiring day laborers.”

  Rovira knew some he could trust: Tomàs from Ca l’Alió; Cisco “the runner,” who would use his cart for anyone who would hire him; Delfí Finet from Cal Marçal, who plowed with his goat; and Sadurní from Ca la Nàsia. Outsiders came in for the harvest in September, including a group from Sant Pere de Riudebitlles. The neighboring farmers often worked for each other, and had their own system for calculating work hours: a day’s use of an animal and a plow, for example, was worth the same as three men’s shifts. A shift meant seven pesetas for a man and five for a woman, but Leon paid ten per shift for all. Still, not even the e
xtra wages could bring in all the workers they needed. The paper mill in the Anoia basin was up and running now; they paid even better, and many of the farmers were more than happy to give up the vineyards for work indoors. The future didn’t lie with the land.

  To make matters worse, Paco Carrión was still adapting to his responsibilities. He didn’t have a good head for the business; it overwhelmed him. And he spent money like crazy, despite Jaume Rovira’s warnings. Since there weren’t enough hands for the job, Paco decided to buy a tractor.

  “Did you talk it over with your brother?” Rovira asked him, mistrust in his voice.

  “What do you think?”

  “What I think is eight hundred thousand pesetas is a lot of money!”

  “I know, but this isn’t just some toy, we need it!” Paco answered with irritation.

  “Fine, fine. You know best! Do what you want!”

  “My brother is the only one who needs to know, and I already told him,” Paco said, enraged. “He thought it was a good idea and said he’ll send a money order to the office of our lawyer, Micaló.”

  Despite the distance, Paco and Jean spoke on the phone often, especially about money. Jean had always trusted his brother with the money, but things were now about to change.

  “Jean, it’s me, Paco . . .” Paco sounded like a man at a funeral.

  “Hey, Paco! What’s up? Everything good at the château?”

  “I’m calling about the money for the tractor . . .”

  “It didn’t get there? They told me it would arrive in less than a week!”

  “Oh, no, no, Jean, don’t worry. The money got here . . . But the lawyer took it and . . .”

  “What, Paco? What happened?”

  “Well, he blew it all on a poker game,” he said.

  “What?” screamed Jean on the other line. “Goddamn it, Paco!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I never should have trusted that guy.”

  “Did you know he was a gambler?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Paco said.

  “Shit, Paco.” Jean took a deep breath. Losing his temper at his brother wouldn’t bring the money back. “Well, don’t beat yourself up over it. What happened to you could happen to anyone. You trusted a man of the law. Now it turns out he’s more rotten than Emilio’s teeth. What can you do?”

  “I’m sorry, Jean, I really am,” Paco said. “I promise you I’ll go get it myself this time, and I’ll keep it under my mattress until it’s time to pay the vendor.”

  “I know. But you can’t do anything about it now, it’s over. It’s just money, it’s not the end of the world.”

  Leon tried to cheer his brother up, but he knew it was time for a change. The best thing would be to put Jaume Rovira in charge of the château and cut Paco out of any responsibility. Especially if he hoped to make the kind of wine he was aiming for, one with personality and character.

  His vineyard already reflected the fruits of tradition and change. But this moment was also a turning point in Jean Leon’s project of making a true estate wine, one that could compete with the French châteaux, where the provenance of the grape could be traced back to the vineyard. If he succeeded, he would be a pioneer of estate wines in Spain.

  Leon and Rovira wanted to acquire vine cuttings from the best wineries in France. They called at the doors of the high temples of wine: red grapes from Château Lafite Rothschild and Château La Lagune in Bordeaux, white from the vineyards of Corton-Charlemagne in Burgundy. They bought thirty thousand vines of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, chardonnay, and merlot, plus a small quantity of pinot noir.

  But the French saw Jean Leon’s interest in their goods as a threat, and what they sold him was practically unusable: withered vines that produced insipid fruit. By the time Leon and Rovira realized, it was too late to complain. Instead of balking, they stuck to their wits, returning to the vineyards after pruning season, when they found the winemakers’ leftover cuttings piled up like garbage next to the walls separating the vineyards from the roads. Jean and Jaume loaded two vans with the vine shoots. They worked at night, filling their sacks by the light of the moon, and before they vanished over the horizon, they agreed to take two separate routes, just in case one of them got caught.

  Jaume Rovira passed over the border at La Jonquera without problems. Jean Leon, who entered via Hendaye, had a brush with the civil guard. Two agents in tricorne hats and trench coats motioned for him to halt, and Leon stopped and rolled down the window.

  “Good evening, sir.” They gave him their habitual military salute.

  “Good evening,” Leon replied laconically.

  “Where are you coming from at this hour?”

  “From Bordeaux. From the Médoc, close to the Gironne. In Bordeaux,” he repeated, his nerves getting the better of him.

  “Bordeaux. You don’t have to tell us twice. You mind showing us what you’re hauling back there?”

  Leon agreed. He got out of the van, opened the back doors, and lifted up the sackcloth. Seeing all the cuttings, the civil guards looked at each other with surprise.

  “What’s this about?” they asked with suspicion. “What are you going to do with all those branches? I don’t think you can bring those into Spain.”

  Nothing about this looked right. And Jean had to make up an answer quick.

  “Do you gentlemen have kids?”

  “Yes, why?” both guards responded in unison.

  “Because this wood I have here is used to make candy.”

  “Candy?!”

  “That’s what I said.” Leon gestured at the shoots and buds. “We have a little factory close to Barcelona. We make candy there. You know how licorice is made from a plant root? Well, other flavors of candy are made that way, too.”

  The agents glanced at each other and nodded, convinced by the explanation. Once more, they gave a military salute and stepped away from the border to let the van through. Leon swallowed and exhaled. It wasn’t until many miles later that his fear dissipated—not until he reached the estate and saw that Jaume had made it across with his haul as well.

  They planted the new varieties right away. Leon and Rovira oversaw the entire process. They had high expectations, but they knew it was a gamble. First, despite all the advice Leon’s contacts in the US had given him, no one could truly say what would happen until the fruit was fermenting in the vats. The vines wouldn’t yield any for three years—maybe even longer, depending on the weather. And Jean and Jaume agreed they wouldn’t settle for just any fruit—they had high hopes for their first bottling, and they wouldn’t bring their wine to market unless they were convinced it was perfect.

  They brought in workers from Sant Pere de Riudebitlles, and there were no complaints from the tenant farmers, most of whom were happy to lease out their land and go to the paper factory in Anoia. The new workers were easygoing, and that meant Jean and Jaume could follow their instincts and plant the foreign varieties there without anyone raising too many difficulties. They seemed to have finally won the farmers over to their side. Leon agreed to pay the workers double the price for the first harvest. Everyone was happy with the excellent conditions offered by the American, as they called him in Penedès.

  Everyone except for a few holdouts who didn’t like the outsider’s new ideas. Pulling up all the traditional varieties was an irritation—or worse, an insult. There were grumblings, day after day, in the old café that had once been the lavish headquarters of the local agricultural cooperative, with its brick facade, its six Ionic columns, its cornice decorated with two large globes, and its eye-catching stained-glass windows.

  A pine bar, varnished hundreds of times, greeted its motley clientele: backwoodsmen, veterinarians, travelers, and salesmen who would order their coffee, wine, or brandy at the bar or play cards at the tables with wrought-iron legs and marble tops. In the wintertime, they filled the stove with hazelnut shells and it warmed the whole room as the smoke from cheap cigars mingled with the toasty scent of th
e nutshells. In summertime, the customers cooled off in the rear courtyard, beneath the shadows of an old pergola, and the open windows and doors let the breezes pass through.

  “Sometimes you just can’t wrap your head around what these goddamn foreigners are after!”

  “He wants to make a different kind of wine.”

  “Different?”

  “Yeah, with grapes from another country. He’s planting them now.”

  “That won’t bring anything but trouble.”

  “So?”

  “I hope lightning strikes that goddamn foreigner!”

  These curses and ill will didn’t take long to reach the gates of Château Leon, and they would cause far more damage than the recent hailstorm that had wrecked the vineyards. One foggy afternoon in 1963, a single intermittent point of light shone through the darkness of the vineyards. Shadows swathed the silhouette of a man in a cape who was trying to make a spark catch by striking two stones against the dry, squalid brush next to the wall separating the vines from the woods. After a couple of failed attempts, hitting his fingers and cursing, he finally succeeded.

  The fire leapt up and consumed the bushes, the underbrush, the tree branches. It spread in flickers, and with it came the unmistakable odor of combustion. It tore through the woods and surrounded the vineyard, insatiable. The trunks of the pines and holly oaks were defenseless without their needles, branches, and leaves to gird them against the oncoming menace. When night fell, the fire redoubled its fury, goaded on by the wind. The vines turned to embers. The tenant farmers and neighbors ran out to save them, but there was nothing they could do. The next day, the dance of colors and sulfurous vapors vanished beneath the sunlight. And nothing was left but smoke and ashes.

  In Torrelavit and the surrounding villages, everyone talked about it. People regretted what had happened, and many pitched in to help clear out the land. In the afternoon, with the fire extinguished and the smoke cleared away, Jean walked to the highest point of his estate to contemplate the charred, desolate landscape in silence. The fire had made the temperature sweltering, but Jean couldn’t help shivering with dread. His mind returned to the days of his childhood.