Antonio Amil was born next to a vine.
Well, almost. His was one of the last home births to take place in Ribeiro. He emerged into the world on one side of the wall, just meters away from the vine growing on the other. Although it didn’t always seem like it, he was fated to be a winemaker. His father and his father’s father were winemakers, heirs to a centuries-old tradition which persisted in Ribeiro—though a far cry from the glories of the sixteenth-century wine trade. Where his ancestors might have sent their wine to be loaded onto ships and sold in Flanders or England, Antonio’s father sold wine to merchants in the cities who dumped it unceremoniously into huge vats, mixed it with wine from other winemakers, and sold it as generic “Ribeiro.”
When Antonio was eight, his father died. He grew up in the vineyard under the tutelage of his uncle, learning to prune and graft and absorbing the knowledge passed down from previous generations. Later, he left the vineyard and went to work in tourism. In 2007, his restlessness got the better of him and he decided to begin buying parcels of vines, hoping to one day start a project worthy of his respect for the territory and tradition. In 2009, he started planning a winery project based on red grapes, which had been largely forgotten in Ribeiro.
In 2016, he made the first wine under the label “Boas Vides,” or “Good Vines.”
Antonio’s love of viticulture is indelibly linked to his love of the land. If one thing defines his philosophy, it’s the need to value and preserve the cultural heritage that surrounds him. He talks animatedly of a dispute with one of his children’s teachers over the omission of local churches from a textbook chapter on Romanesque architecture. “If these kids are going to grow up and know nothing about where they come from, how are they expected to value it?” he asks.
Recognizing the inherent worth of Ribeiro’s cultural and architectural heritage runs counter to a deep vein of self-hatred that still lives in the subconscious of many Galicians, and even extends to the Galician language. Banned under Franco, much of the older generation grew up thinking that to get ahead in life, you had to speak Spanish. Speaking Gallego was associated with rural life and poverty—to be avoided at all costs.
That same aversion to rural life—and the poverty that often came with it—still persists in some parts, and it’s one reason why many vines still lie abandoned. The rural exodus of the twentieth century left abandoned houses, fields, and terraced vineyards in its wake. Across Galicia, entire villages lie in ruins where rural life once thrived.
In recent years, Galicia’s regional government has begun to provide subsidies for those brave enough to return to the countryside and restore centuries-old stone houses and farms, but many of the terraces in Ribeiro are slowly slipping into oblivion. Antonio thinks that another reason for that lies in growers’ stubbornness. “People don’t want to sell, they’re very suspicious,” he says. “I’ve had success with some, others not so much.” For him, success comes when people realize the importance of what surrounds them. “I’m not going to get rich from this,” he recognizes matter-of-factly, “but this is something I’m going to leave for my children and their children, if they want it.”
Antonio probably knows more about Ribeiro than any person alive today. I call him the “wise man of Ribeiro” for his encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s history, terroir, and his dedication to recovering traditional vineyards and planting them with native grapes. In June, he took me to one of the vineyards that he’s painstakingly recovering in San Lourenzo da Pena. We talked about the history of Ribeiro and why these old vineyards are worth saving.
“[These vineyards] have a story, which is very important. If this vineyard has been like this for a thousand years, then it’s a place that’s worth growing grapes, and that also has the capacity to generate added value.”
Antonio tells me that in 1920, Ribeiro had over 20,000 hectares of vines planted throughout the region. In the Avia valley alone, there were over 5,000 hectares. Today, there are only about 500 hectares in the Avia valley and another 500 in the rest of Ribeiro. Civil war, poverty, and emigration gutted Ribeiro’s population as people flooded out of the region, abandoning their vines and seeking a better life in Galicia’s cities, the Americas, and the rest of Europe.
The terraces are still there, covered by the rapidly-growing underbrush and the forests that covered the Avia valley’s slopes over the decades. Antonio explains that if someone abandons a vineyard in Ribeiro, it’s covered by grass and weeds within a year. Huge amounts of rain in the spring and a mild growing season mean Ribeiro is the perfect place for all sorts of plant life. In just three years a forest can spring up where terraces once stood.
This unchecked plant growth over the years has covered up all but 10% of Ribeiro’s terraces—and that percentage is dropping fast. Ribeiro is the kingdom of the minifundio, or smallholding. Antonio explains that historically, the Church was the largest landowner in Ribeiro, followed by a handful of nobles. Most families farmed parcels of less than a hectare. Galician inheritance laws mean that these small parcels were divvied up into even smaller parcels over the years, leaving tiny vineyards—some of which are the size of a studio apartment.
When elderly winegrowers (the average grower in Ribeiro is 65 years old) retire or die, Antonio tells me that the larger wineries don’t want to farm their tiny parcels. Big wineries are looking for hectares, not a couple thousand square meters.
I finished our conversation by asking why these small vineyards are important and worth saving. Those vineyards are looked after with great care, and they’re farmed with an artisanal precision viticulture which is very well-adapted to our grapes,” he tells me. “And they also have a story, which is very important. That’s to say, if this vineyard has been like this for a thousand years, then it’s a place that’s worth growing grapes, and that also has the capacity to generate added value. They’re granitic soils made with their little walls, carefully cared for by everyone who came before—not just the old people who are there today. So from there you can make very exclusive wines, and really high quality wines like they always were historically.”
Podo acreditar e acredito de que este reportaxe e fidel a realidade sociocultural que Nel se reflicte,noraboa o seu autor,Noah Chister