The camera of a neighbouring heating and gas industrial warehouse captures at twelve-twenty at night how the first vine is collapsing. There are some bundles moving at the entrance to the 7,000 square metre estate located on the edge of the national highway 550, which runs through the west of Galicia from A Coruña to Tui. The recording, already in the hands of the Civil Guard, is the prelude to the sabotage of a vineyard of the Rías Baixas designation of origin, in the Pontevedra municipality of Barro, one month before the date on which the Albariño grape harvest was due to begin.
Around and among the vines there are rose bushes, lantanas, agapanthus, hydrangeas and other ornamental plants that no one has touched, together with vines cut down at the root, some 940 of the 980 that were about to give their grape harvest this year. The “terrorist” attack, as defined by the 11 partners of the Moraima Cooperative, the largest in the Pontevedra region, but the smallest in the famous designation of origin, was perpetrated in the early hours of Thursday 1 to Friday 2 August and they assure that it is not a response to any settling of scores between people in the sector, neither on the part of the competition nor on the part of the workers.
“There are no debts, we have no problems with anyone and we are very healthy… or we were until Friday,” corrects Roberto Rivas, one of the cooperative members who these days receives the press and television under the withered and dead trellis from which the spoiled bunches still hang. “We have a suspicion and the Civil Guard is working on that hypothesis,” he says before closing in so as not to harm the investigation. The cooperative members point to the “growing controversy in the vineyard areas with the phytosanitary treatments” used by winegrowers.
According to sources related to the case, the investigation has already identified a possible person responsible for the sabotage, who did not act directly but commissioned the attack to a group that entered the vineyard at night, armed with hand saws and shears, as well as battery-powered chainsaws, “which make less noise.” It is believed that the vineyard executioners acted in an orderly fashion, following the rows marked by the trellis posts, and that they acted quickly, because in the middle of the night they had left some areas untreated. Those few vines, green spots among so many dry, yellow and brown leaves, are the survivors from which the winemakers will reorganize the future plantation.
Among the vines that died were many Albariño, Caíño and Ratiño, the latter grape, also native to the area but less known, having almost disappeared and currently being recovered in the province of Pontevedra. Almost all of these vines were planted by the cooperative members when they took over this land four years ago, which had been donated by a neighbour who lives next door. The winegrowers had waited until now and this would be the first harvest in which they would produce. Other dead vines, however, are “irreplaceable and of incalculable value”, centuries or bicentennials old. After surviving centuries, these thick cut vines continue to weep sap from the trunk cut off five days after the attack. “If it had been in spring”, some of the very old vines could sprout again, laments Rivas, “but now it is impossible”. Among these old vines, some of the red grapes were being studied by the Biological Mission of Galicia (CSIC) “because the variety had not yet been identified.”
What matters most is what happens closer to home. To make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
KEEP READING
This farm is one of the many farms worked by the cooperative members of Moraima. Its owner gave up the vineyard, which had been abandoned for years, with the only condition that the members kept the oldest vines, from their ancestors. Next to this lady’s house and on the edge of the vineyard, there are two or three other inhabited houses. “You, dear saboteur, who did not play under a vine as a child, are still not aware of the magnitude of what you have done, because we are not just talking about money,” the president of the cooperative, Salomé Cancela, wrote on the website of the cooperative.
“If what you wanted was to hurt us, congratulations, you succeeded. You can be satisfied. Your efforts (or those of those who did the dirty work for you, because we are sure that in addition to being a criminal you are a coward) paid off,” the partners of the winery acknowledge in their statement. “Open letter to the saboteur”“Since last Friday, all of us who are part of Viña Moraima have been speechless, with our hearts in our mouths, and a pain that will take a long time to pass, if it ever passes,” they lament.
The events under investigation occurred in the midst of the festivities of the 72nd Festa do Albariño in Cambados (Pontevedra), an annual event attended first by Manuel Fraga and then by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who acted as Grand Master in the traditional ceremony of investing the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Most Serene Chapterwith capes designed by Adolfo Domínguez. Some members of Moraima attended the winegrowers’ banquet at the weekend, while the Civil Guard was already investigating the incident. There they received support from the other winemakers. “No one who belongs to this world would be capable of attacking a vineyard like that,” they were told. And quite a few pointed in the same direction: “The war against phytosanitary products.”
If the four-year-old vines that were cut down were to produce for the first time, the cooperative members are looking to another four years to obtain a harvest of the plants with which they intend to replace the thousand guillotined vines. The sabotage will postpone the fruits, but will not change the methods at all: the producers will treat the vineyards with pesticides again when they consider it necessary. Environmental groups and unions warned at the end of June about the arrival of large foreign companies in the wine sector in the regions where the Rías Baixas denomination is cultivated. They warn of the replacement of forest stands by vineyards where chemical treatments are proliferating.
According to the cooperative’s calculations, this year the grapes lost in the attack will cost them 30,000 euros, but the figure must be “multiplied by four,” Roberto Rivas recalls. They will lose “around 120,000 euros,” confirms Salomé Cancela. This, without counting the value of the hundred-year-old grapes, which are impossible to reduce to numbers. “That cannot be paid for, and neither can seeing an 85-year-old member cry,” says Rivas sadly, while clinging to the lifeless vine of an old vineyard. “The vine is strong, resistant; it adapts to the conditions in which it lives, season after season, year after year,” concludes the public letter from Bodega Moraima. “The vine is memory, it is wisdom, it is history. But it is also fragile, and one cut is enough for everything to disappear forever.”
#Civil #Guard #surrounds #perpetrators #sabotage #vines #killed #200yearold #vines