Last Wednesday we went to the presentation at the Citilab Cornella, "La Bobal and other stories of wine, "a documentary by Zev Robinson puts the lens on the difficulties of survival of a single variety, typical of the region Utiel -Requena, who until recently served to make cheap wine.
It is an independent look of someone who has no vested interest in the wine world except his own passion, he can not avoid living in a country whose culture goes through the vineyards and wine production since time immemorial.
These are my notes on what I saw and heard:
1) the importance of promoting indigenous varieties as a way to fight for diversity in the expression of the wine and cushion the weight of the globalized varieties.
2) the importance of Spain to promote the brand more than a DO in particular that can kill the rest. Typical Rioja. We might ask here how much good it does to the general Spanish wine in his conquest of international markets but also at national level, how the brand is imposed Rioja. In the international market but I suppose in Spanish, too, the consumer pays better than a mediocre rioja wine such excellent Utiel-Requena.
3) as they will count the most experienced winemakers in the area, they have made the sacrifice to pay for their children sacaralos field studies, who feel very thankless task, hard and less pay.
4) Spain as a wine producing country is still characterized by first making the wines and then consider how to sell. It seems that once again confirms that knows how to make wine but not transform it into a thriving business.
It seems that this film did not fall quite right between the authorities of the regulatory council quue thing is no stranger to the world of wine in general in Spain: there is no real space to the self as one way of identifying problems and then solve them.
After seeing this film back on the need to wonder about the origin of the DO and the regulatory boards and how they affect the true and free expression of different varieties and wine lands.
These are the corsets that natural wine producers and is therefore rejected among other reasons that their wines are classified as table wines and do not point to any DO that can help them to be identified but that can change over creativity condition land, the grape and man.
I think they are the challenges that people have developed in our daily life in market societies, how to fight a standardization that impoverishes us without giving us anything in return?
Salut!
