A nightmare

A nightmare

old vineyards DOQ Priorat Josep Roca

We are living a nightmare. Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I am disoriented. Just like that character trapped in time on Groundhog Day. What is happening to us I wonder? Will it always be that way from now on? And since I’m kind of a positive guy I think, we’ll get away with it anyway.

The other day while meditating over the topic I thought what all this would have been like without the media we have today. Mobile phones, apps, networks, video chats… We have information on everything and at all times. Nothing comparable to those years of our great-grandparents and great-grandparents when at the end of the 19th century they saw the disappearance of the whole vineyard smitten by the phylloxera plague. I imagine the despair, the disbelief, and in the end the painful decision to emigrate to another place.

The Priorat went from 30,000 inhabitants to 10,000 today. More than a century has passed.

Today we are trying to understand the pandemic that has befallen us, and we have the means to do so. And we will get out of it and see the fruit of the earth and our work again. But in 1893, despite news arriving by telegraph or newspapers no one knew what was happening. It was the heroism of our ancestors that, without the facilities we have now, made it possible to resurrect a land, a way of farming it and a product of the highest quality. That must have been a nightmare. A nightmare with a heroic awakening.

Josep Roca
jroca@devinssi.com
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