The monster and the canela
word by Federico Levinart by Fernanda Kusel
hace click aquí para leer en castellano
Two guys converse one afternoon in October 2010 at a farm in San Rafael, Mendoza. One is younger, skinny, and curly-haired, with a somewhat urban look: Santiago Salgado. The other guy, José Antonio, is an older man who looks like he has lived his entire life in this precise spot. They spend a good while standing around drinking mate. They sit down and share some wine. Zunilda comes over and brings some homemade bread, cheese, and olives to go with it.
At dusk, a strong wind picks up. Along with the sound of the swirling leaves and the peremptory threat of a day that may suddenly come to an end, the breeze brings Santiago something unexpected, a smell that quickly turns into an aroma: it smells like cinnamon. It smells green, to the tone of the slightly psychedelic hue of vine blossom, and, surprisingly, like canela, which translates to cinnamon. First, Santiago doubts his nose, despite its usual faithfulness, after all, it is his main detective tool. Is it or isn’t it? He looks at the vineyard and does the math: Syrah, Torrontés, Malbec. No, it can’t be. Until his look averts and finds, not in the vineyard but next to José Antonio’s house, two stray vine rows. That’s where the smell is coming from.
He feels a euphoria erupt that is hard to put into words, impossible to understand for someone who does not know its history. The smell is not that of cinnamon sticks, the ones that are boiled to make tea, prepared with curry, or sprinkled onto the foam of coffee to make a cappuccino in the big cities. No. It is the canela grape that releases that subtle breath during its flowering.
Is it?
We still don’t know. But to understand the enormity of this moment, the profoundness of this question, in order to switch on our curiosity, we must first know Santiago’s story. And that of the Canela grape.
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Santiago’s story.
When Argentina went bust towards the end of 2001, Santiago had an English-language children’s theater company that worked with bilingual schools. It did well. It was his creation, born from his ingenuity and sustained by his management skills. When the economy crashed, he supported his employees as long as he could without receiving an income, which was about a year, until he finally had to shut it down. When the country finished its freefall, his source of income had already disappeared: a tragedy, common and widespread.
In that critical moment, Santiago considered the city a shrewd creature fueled by money. When there is no money, the creature grows. Harsh. Violent. Unpredictable. Although the entire country had imploded, the most urgent matter was to get out of the city.
With a handful of dollars spared from the crash, he went out to look for a piece of land far from the capital. He visited some counties in the province of Buenos Aires and others in Córdoba. Since his partner worked in theater, the agreement was to find something close to an urban center so that she could continue her profession. A bit of chance and his partner’s instructions set them on the path to a plot of land in the district of Las Paredes, San Rafael, in the province of Mendoza.
Santiago began to make wines with the criollo grapes that were on the land because he believes in getting his hands dirty, and the grapes were there. He bought the right books and started with the methods recommended by the local winemakers.
After several harvests, he began to break the rules, making wines with less sulfites and less tartaric acid. Less intervention. He was thrilled by the results: strong wines, sometimes messy, but unique and honest. He began to have the confidence to make wines with his own methods. In other words, he began to find his own way of making wines: out in the open in the crosswinds of economic and environmental crisis. If technology (like what is needed for filtering and stabilizing) wasn’t necessary, he didn’t use it. Nor did he accept the usual advice to destroy the land with poisons. He learned that he could make different wines, and to do so, it wasn't necessary to surrender quietly to the traditional methods but rather recover his rebellious, satirical, and sagacious roots. And so he began to bottle and distribute his fermented grape juices under the name Las Payas, with labels that were declarations of varied principles.
Santiago shied away from Malbec from the start. Why? Because "there are already too many people making Malbec." Or because it doesn't make sense to make Malbec in San Rafael when a place like the Uco Valley and other regions where it grows better exist. Or because "Malbec is dull and watery." In short, Malbec is hegemonic, and Santiago is anti-hegemonic by design. That's simply his nature.
He began to visit farms and vineyards in San Rafael and the surrounding area, looking for small producers of grapes of rare, forgotten varieties that did not use agrochemicals. Whenever he visited a farmer to get to know their vineyards and, if necessary, buy grapes from them, he tasted their homemade wine. The wine they made with their hands in small quantities for their daily consumption. That was how he came across a rare type of wine that caught his attention from the first sip because of its golden, oxidized character. It was canela grape wine.
He began to look for canela to ferment. But he couldn’t find any. Those who had canela grapes didn’t have much of them. And they did not sell them, either. They drank them. Usually, he found canela mixed with other criolla grapes — no one would dedicate an entire row to it. It was a forgotten grape, given the cold shoulder. Only a few small producers, lifelong farmers, treated it with care and cultivated it. But they did so less and less. Because when the big customers arrive — the large wineries that guarantee economic survival — they don’t pay for canela. They want malbec. Or otherwise syrah, or torrontés, or cabernet. But not canela.
After a few months of research, Santiago knew it was a grape capable of producing a very special wine specific to the region; he understood that this was the taste of the area's hidden story. But it was disappearing. It seemed to be the end of its story.
The story of canela.
This story begins with the crossing of two great grape lineages, which also represent two migratory waves within the history of mankind.
On one end, the listán negro, a species of wine that entered Europe millennia ago through the Balkans and continued its journey until it settled in the Mediterranean. Characteristic of the Canary Islands, it was brought to South America by Captain Hernando de Montenegro in the 16th century, who was responsible for the development of viticulture on the continent.
On the other hand, the small-grained Moscatel. It was introduced to Spain by the Moors, like all Moscatel grapes, mainly for young wine or raisins, and brought to America by Jesuit missionaries. From this coexistence of European progenitors and thanks to cross-pollination, a new variety emerged as a mixed ‘criollo’: the canela.
For centuries, it was blended with other criollas of similar origin (such as cereza, criolla grande, pedro gimenez, or Riojan torrontés) to make table wines. That is why when you drink canela, you feel the memory of old wines, the noble and cheap wines our grandparents used to drink. But the decades passed, the '90s arrived, and the winemaking was reconverted. The industry went towards producing fine, strong wines from French grape varieties to meet the taste of the international market. Then Malbec showed up, hegemonic and omnipresent, and everyone began to plant Malbec because it was what sold. Canela and all its criollo cousins began to get pushed out. With much less presence than torrontés or even the criolla chica, canela began to disappear from the map until it was cornered to near extinction in a few vineyards scattered across the country's vastness.
This is how it was going for canela back in 2007, when Santiago arrived to an aging José Antonio through recommendations of friends, neighbors, and their respective relatives. José Antonio produced syrah, malbec, and chardonnay on his estate. Santiago was interested in syrah. One hot afternoon at the end of February, after agreeing on the price of the grapes, Santiago spotted a large glass window lying in the pasture. He thought it would be perfect for the winery he was building on his property and asked for a price. José Antonio told him he didn't plan to use it, so he could just take it. Except, it was too big for Santiago’s truck. Naturally, José Antonio offered him his car, which he could return later. That afternoon, Santiago was accompanied by his youngest daughter, who would have been about 10 years old at the time. "Did you see what just happened?" Santiago asked her as they drove home carrying the window in José Antonio's car. "Yes," she said. "The guy would rather risk losing a car than distrust the person in front of him."
Trust was not the result of the bond, but its origin. Santiago continued to buy grapes, year after year. Always syrah.
Until we return to this afternoon: they drink mate standing up, then they drink wine sitting down. Zunilda approaches with a smile and homemade bread. She kneaded it herself. They talk about the weather, something that, for Santiago, during his life in Buenos Aires, was uncomfortable chatter, and now it is an inevitable, organic exchange. A strong wind rises (was it the last hot northerly wind of the season?) and brings that smell. The scent of canela.
Santiago walks towards the stray vine rows next to the house and asks the question almost with embarrassment.
Is it?
José Antonio nods. Santiago asks him if it is for sale, and José Antonio tells him it’s reserved for a brother-in-law who buys it from him every year to make table wine. Santiago knows that in the countryside, these agreements are kept until the grave. He feels a bit of sorrow, but deep down, he is reassured to know that as long as José Antonio's brother-in-law drinks his homemade wine, José Antonio will keep the rows of canela in his vineyard, and as long as that happens, canela will continue to exist on the earth.
If we were writing a fictional gastro-detective novel, we could not avoid the temptation to drag Santiago out of bed one cold winter night. Obsessed with an idea, he gets into his truck, speeds through the San Rafael roads, takes a dirt route, drives for miles in the dark, gets out in front of an isolated house, some dogs bark, etc.
But this is a real story, and what drives it is trust. Two years later, José Antonio's deal with his brother-in-law ended, although we don't know if it was because of a death or for some other reason. And that is how Santiago began to buy José Antonio's canela. Since then, he has done so every year.
"José Antonio sets the price as he pleases, he charges me more than the Malbec,” says Santiago. “I told him that he had a treasure and he charges me accordingly."
Santiago harvests it early, ferments it like an orange wine (using its skins and seeds to ferment it), and takes great care to bother it as little as possible until it’s poured into bottles and then into mouths to say what it needs to say. Perhaps, its final words.
As long as Santiago makes this wine, José Antonio will keep those rows. And Canela will not disappear, buried by oblivion.
When I ask myself about the reasons that lead Santiago to do what he does, even if it means making very difficult wines to sell, I think of a profound empathy. The empathy of someone who knows that he, too, will extinguish. A singular human among many humans. I don't know how much longer the world will allow singularities like his to survive. Outside the market, beyond the principle of profitability, in laborious harmony with his environment, on the fringe of any community but in constant communication.
According to the Argentine writer Aberto Laiseca, monsters are, by definition, unique beings within their species. Without peers, without descendants, without lineage. And they frighten us because we project the horror of meaninglessness, the emptiness of our finitude in them. Santiago, in that sense, is a particular kind of monster. He flirts with that sentiment: he says that wine is fleeting, that a person's work on earth is transient, which is just as well. This fleetingness is opposed to the laws of the market, which claim that a wine is always the same, time and time again, even though the grapes are always different and their conditions change. Once, at a wine tasting, he was asked if he had passed on the love of wine to his daughters. Would they follow his legacy? Would they make 'free' wines?
Fortunately, no.
That was the sarcastic reply. And he doubled down: he himself was not going to continue his legacy. In fact, he was thinking of retiring.
He sounded like a happy monster.
However, there is something in this story that is passed on. Passed down from generation to generation.
I take a sip of Santiago's canela, which he calls Bicho Raro, an oddball. To say that in this wine you can taste the fruit is much more than a typical sommelier's descriptor.
Let's imagine that someone viscerally understands that all of this is going to end, and instead of fighting that sensation, they embrace it. And they leave their legacy — a battle for a lost cause, a fruit that endures a little longer in the world, with its smell, its taste, its acidity, and all its genetic novelty.
I read the label: “Canela 2022. Unfiltered and unstabilized. Only 521 bottles without sulfites or other additives". It gives me goosebumps. I think that might also be the story of Santiago Salgado and his wines. His meeting with the canela.
A joyful story, but of a hopeless joy: like a presence, a voice that lingers a little longer.
—
Federico Levin is a writer and reader of novelas, essays, short stories, and poetry, probably in that order. He’s the author of trilogy of gastro-crime stories, Ceviche, The Pig’s Pocket, and The Stewed Tongue, and has worked as a television writer, editor, and coordinator of workshops, among other things. You can find him on Instagram.
Fernanda Kusel is a painter. In her last show, she presented a series of paintings of altars for guests that never arrive. She lives and works in Buenos Aires. You can follow her on Instagram.
Paul Holzman is a North American translator and musician living in Buenos Aires. He runs a poetry zine called Palometa and he can be read or heard on his blog, Lepersquint.