The moon and the wine

The first full moon of March. Dogs howl on hilltops, hairy werewolves menace the villages, moonstruck lovers swoon helplessly into each others’ arms and an early divorce. And there is more, much more happening in the blue glow of this magical night…

From early the next morning, the air fills with a new sound, a soft snip-snipping: ‘Listen! What’s that?’ It’s all around, as though the entire local population has decided to trim its toenails.

A short walk around reveals what’s happening. It’s the vines that are being trimmed! There are vines outside many of the houses in our village, climbing over simple pergolas made of metal tubing, and everyone is clipping away last year’s twigs in preparation for the bright new growth of spring.

But why has everyone chosen today to prune their vines, all at the same time? In our first year here, intrigued, we asked a neighbour. Víctor looked surprised. ‘Well, it’s the menguante!’ Blank stares. ‘La luna menguante,’ he repeated. ‘You know - getting smaller. The moon.’

Ahah, got it! The waning moon. This is the right time to prune your vines, the only time. We tried to get Víctor to explain why and he took a good shot at it - sap in the vine rises and falls with the moon, obviously, and if you’re going to cut pieces off it, well… He shrugged. How can anyone really explain such mysteries of nature? It’s how things are, everyone knows!

It seemed to work, anyway. Soon afterwards we encountered the end results of this tradition. We were much younger, even more foolish than now and heavily into exploration on foot. On this particular day we were exploring a minor road from the island’s capital, San Sebastián, that guided us gently along the southern side of the long river valley. As we walked, rucksacks on our backs, the landscape gradually transformed itself from a suburban clutter of schools and warehouses into scenery increasingly more spectacular and beautiful.

Hiking along a road or track away from any coast will generally take you upwards, and nowhere more so than in La Gomera. As you gain altitude the weather may get sunnier and warmer or cooler and cloudier, even misty, depending on where you are. Dramatically different microclimates are a big feature of the island. Today we were walking into heat. After a couple of hours we were already faltering. With our water bottles nearly empty we seriously considered turning back.

And what a shame that would have been! Around the very next corner we found a cafe-bar. There is usually a cafe-bar around the next corner in Spain, less reliably in the interior of this island because it’s all National Park, but we hadn’t reached the park yet and there were two cafe-bars in a small settlement along the road.

We tumbled gratefully into the first. ‘Dos cervezas, por favor!’ Two beers, with the r properly emphasised, the v more like a b and the c and z both lisped, which is what they do in Madrid but not in La Gomera. Full marks for trying, though. Watching with friendly amusement was a local man of around our age standing at the bar. ‘Alemanes?’ he asked. Being taken for Germans is standard because they discovered the place long before the Brits. We corrected him. ‘Ah, ingleses…’ In those days it didn’t matter much anyway because all foreigners were from allí abajo, literally ‘down there’ but it means ‘over there’, with a hand-wave indicating great distance. I love the concept of a vast, vague otherness encompassing everywhere except this little rock, but it’s fast disappearing because Gomerans are now much more widely travelled.

Our new acquaintance, Agustín, was snacking on yam dressed with mojo verde - olive oil, garlic and coriander - and he called the barman to supply us with forks so we could share it. He was drinking wine though, he pointed out, not beer. Wine was much more traditional than beer in La Gomera. In fact he made his own wine, he told us - not vino tinto like this one, his wine was white, but very good.

Half an hour later we were standing inside his private bodega, a plain little hut made from grey cement blocks, but inside was a row of proper oak casks. He took three small glasses from a shelf, inspected them critically then took them outside to rinse them in the roadside gutter. Seeing our faces, he chuckled and explained that the water gurgling along the gutter was from a spring further up the hill. This was good water!

Agustín’s wine was excellent too, made from last year’s harvest, a dry but fruity white. He filled a bottle for us to take away. He also had orange trees, he told us, on his finca just up the road. Would we like to see…?

One of the more serious hazards of walking in La Gomera is that your rucksacks can grow heavier instead of lighter. We trudged homewards with several kilos of oranges as well as the wine. They were wonderful oranges though, and we’d made a new friend. Agustín is now retired like us but he still makes wine and grows oranges. And bananas, but best not to mention those, they’re even heavier than oranges.

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As well as the home winemakers there are several commercial producers in La Gomera, all fairly small and mostly in the north of the island where the climate is less dry for their vines. The island council, the Cabildo, provides communal facilities for bottling and marketing, which I think is very enlightened of them.

The main grape variety for white wines is the Forastera, of which Gomera has its own unique cultivar probably introduced by the Conquistadores in the fifteenth century, so that’s one thing at least that we can thank them for.

For red wine the main variety is the Listán Negro which produces a characterful, robust red with just a hint of pepper in the flavour. It goes superbly well with the local goat cheese. Or anything, really.