On Luxury, Part I (Laureano Serres’s “Terme de Guiu: La Plana Trankil” 2020)
The small Catalan town of Pinell de Brai is host to ten bars—twelve if you count the seasonal stand on the high school soccer pitch and a pool open only during the summer months. It makes for a quite the ratio, as Pinell is home to only about a thousand people, many of whom begin their days at one of these bars with a fresh omelette and anchovies, tripe stew, or a sandwich of ripe, tangy cheese and ‘nduja-like pork spread. Breakfast is often capped with a carajillo, an invigorating tonic of espresso and liquor, usually brandy. At night, these same bars are peppered with people eating olives grown nearby and drinking wine, sometimes poured by the person who made it.
During harvest, Pinell’s narrow streets are filled with the sweet, heady smell of fermenting grapes. Trucks stacked with macabeo and every shade of garnatxa trundle toward small family bodegas and the wine co-op, an imposing, Gaudi-school building called the Cathedral of Wine. A comic strip of ceramic tiles hedges the building’s mid-section and depicts the winemaking process: work in the vines, harvest, pressing, laying grapes to rest and, of course, drinking.
I could go on. It’s easy to luxuriate in the immediate, consumable details that make Pinell such a special place, but on my first morning in town, bleary from an over-saturated first evening, it was the mountains that struck me with their broader context.
The air came first, smelling of iron, followed by slices of salmon-pink cliffs at the horizon line. Later that morning, we drove through those same mountains on our way to the vineyards of Laureano Serres. The road’s switchbacks are second-nature to him and as he drove, Laure talked about Franco and—pointing towards divits in the rock—the rebel groups who hid here in caves during the Spanish Civil War. After several miles of squat trees and thick, dark-green scrub, the mountains dropped away again and we arrived at the low-slung amphitheatre of Terme de Guiu.
This visit was in 2018, my first wine trip and, more importantly, my first experience of wine’s origin point: not only mountains and shrubs and alpine air, but clay-heavy soil dotted with almond trees, wild clover among the vines, and an overwhelming sense of place rooted in history, agriculture, and, most deeply, in nature. In conversation with one another, these categories reveal themselves to be more complex and permeable, and seeing that conversation play out in situ—a vineyard managed in concert with the land’s rhythm and provisions—clarifies its impact on that vineyard’s product.
Stuccoed walls throughout Pinell declare “VISCA LA TERRA'' in sprawling graffiti, mixed in with other messages more explicitly in support of Catalan sovereignty. The phrase means “long live the land,” and is tied to the region’s pride and centuries-long separatist struggle as much as it is to the soil. Translated more literally, you can read it as “live the land,” a concept deeply integrated into the town’s daily life: residents deposit their compost to be collected from buckets hooked to the thresholds of their front doors; the fishmonger’s daily catch is broadcast over a tinny loudspeaker every afternoon; and the village’s many bars serve wines made almost exclusively in Pinell, or at the very least, in Catalunya. It’s not just persistent pride—though it is that, certainly—but also persistent dialogue with the land that grounds this place. This is where I was transported to as I drank Laureano Serres’s “La Plana Trankil” from 2020.
Labeled with no small dose of humor and bottled with a bit of residual sugar, “Trankil” (“calm”) is a lightly-sparkling macabeu from Terme de Guiu. It was explosive at opening, even after ample time in the fridge, but with a hasty first pour and a few minutes of settling, the suds mellowed. After drinking many crown-capped wines from Laure over the years, I should know better and stash them in the freezer for a beat; the vigor of naturally-sparkling wines can be unpredictable in general, but his bottlings are predictable in their unpredictability, some with a soft froth that will blow off quickly, and others with a tight-knit, elegant bubble, like this one. There’s a lot to chew on here; macabeu, already a richer grape, was harvested ripe and pressed slowly, lending the wine another layer of fine-grained texture. It’s saline and mineral-dense, but the bit of sugar and resulting bubbles keep this wine buzzing happily in the glass. There’s a Catalan proverb, “from a sad tree, don’t expect good fruit[1],” and this is certainly proof that the inverse is true.
Bearing witness to Pinell de Brai is bittersweet. A place whose people and products are so deeply enmeshed with the land they spring from feels like a luxury, and it is. This symbiosis is hard to find and, tucked behind the bottle out of context on a shelf, often hard to see. But it’s crucial to pay attention to this connection between what we consume and its coming-into-being not just for a more enriching experience, but because the remaining examples of symbiosis are being disturbed. The mountains may not be shrinking, but, in wine’s broader context, the Land is.
[1] “De l'arbre dolent no esperis bon fruit,” shared by Josh Eubank, Laureano Serres’ importer, in his September newsletter.