Valdecamellas
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Eleven weeks in which nothing visible happens and everything is decided. This issue looks at the part of the calendar the trade treats as dead time: the pause itself, the ninety years of oak behind a barrel, a decade of weather written down plot by plot, and the winter round of tasting a cellar one barrel at a time.
Between the last leaf falling and the first sap rising there is an interval of about eleven weeks for which this trade has never built a proper name. It has no gesture to photograph and no moment at which anything visibly happens — and yet anybody who has spent forty winters here will point at this hole in the calendar as the weeks that decide the wine.
Read the full storyTrifón
Vine-grower · Vol. I, No. 02
“There are eleven weeks in which nobody comes. They are the ones that decide the wine, and they are the only ones we have never charged for.”
We speak with the man who has pruned these vines through more than eighty growing cycles, the winegrower about the decision that matters most to him each year: when to stop watching the vineyard and begin to trust it.
“What happens in the vineyard between November and February that cannot be photographed?”
A. Q. —“Almost everything. The soil reorganizes, the roots make decisions without asking, and the old vines, above all, learn what we did not yet know how to ask of them. Working well in those months means not being there.”
Two weeks in Fresnillo de las Dueñas without a tripod, without a script and without asking anyone permission to enter. These are four of the thirty images selected for this issue.
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