The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (27 page)

I was pleased with this opportunity to display my credentials, because I reckoned that Paco and José were looking forward to a snigger at my expense. But the truth is – even though I say it myself – long practice has made me pretty slick in this esoteric country skill.

The first thing to remember is that it’s quite
unacceptable
to put the spout in your mouth and suck it – which on the surface seems the obvious thing to do. The Spanish tend to be delicate about sharing bottles of water or wine with the sort of person who wraps their lips around the spout to drink. They fear the backwash and floaters.

The technique for drinking from a
bota
is to tilt your head back, open your mouth and raise the bag about a hand’s breadth from your lips. Then you squeeze it enough to eject an accurate stream of wine into the back of your mouth, while you slowly move it away from you until your arms are straight. This aerates the wine and allows a little sunlight
to enter as the fine stream arcs, glittering through the air. It’s essential to maintain a steady pressure, to allow for wind deflection and to swallow constantly with your mouth open – a physical refinement not everyone can master. All this is second nature to a man who knows the
bota,
but it’s endlessly amusing to watch beginners as they spray wine deep into their nostrils, in their eyes, all down their fronts and, on the odd occcasion when they do manage to get a squirt into their mouth, to see them hacking and coughing and incontinently blurting the wine up and out.

I thought it a little early in the proceedings to be starting on the wine, but entered into the spirit of the thing
nonetheless
and took the proffered
bota.
Paco and José watched with barely disguised disappointment as I took a long pull. The wine, the rough Alpujarran country variety known as costa, burned as it splashed onto the back of my palate, vapourising and filling my mouth with hot, tar-scented mist.

I rocked forward and lowered the
bota
to finish, with barely a drop dribbling down my front.

‘Uggh,
costa,’
I said, grimacing, and wiping my mouth on my forearm. ‘I mean, you can drink the stuff but you can never really like it. Can you?’

‘What nonsense,
tonto,’
said Paco sharply. ‘Of course you can enjoy
costa
, and the one you’re drinking is perfectly good.’ And, as if to illustrate the point, he lifted the
bota
from my unworthy hands and took a long, satisfying pull.

‘You must understand, Cristóbal,’ José explained, ‘that you can’t approach
costa
like those fancy Catalan wines you favour. You have to bear in mind the fierce conditions up there in the Contraviesa, the hardship and the pain of caring for those old vines by hand.’

 ‘That’s the truth,’ interjected Paco, ‘but you’ve become too
delicado
to notice. Consorting with all those literary folks has shrivelled your balls – you no longer know the meaning of physical work.’

Paco had touched a nerve here: having spent nearly thirty years of my life making a living from manual labour of one sort or another, I found it hard to think of writing as a proper job. Somehow, earning money from sitting at a table with a book and a pen, doesn’t feel quite… well, honest. In an attempt to defend myself I told them about the appalling
costas
I’d drunk on my shearing jobs, and suggested that most of these wines had industrial alcohol added to the vat.

My fellow members of the Society winced at the very idea. ‘You’ve been prejudiced by your too narrow
experience
, my friend,’ José chided me. ‘Trust us. We’ll get you some decent costa before the day is out, and see if we can’t change your mind.’ And with that he raised the
bota
again and took another few mouthfuls. This talk of fine wine was making him thirsty.

We continued along the cobbled way to the village of Notáez, whose pretty patios and little squares were
displaying
the signs of an early spring – lemon trees were
bursting
into bud, bougainvillea draped itself across the stone walls and succulents burst exuberantly over the edge of their pots. Passing through the village we struck up the hill towards Cástaras. As we walked we talked of the demise of local agriculture, and of the
caminos,
the mule tracks built in the times of the Romans or the Moors and only now falling into disrepair.

The
camino
that we were following wound among the village’s few remaining cultivated terraces, some so tiny as to be barely worth the effort. A terrace might contain a single orange tree, surrounded by a dozen lovingly tended
haba
plants, a clump or two of poppies and a few feathery wild fennel in the corner by the rocks. In places streams of water cascaded over stone walls to spread across a tiny paddy field of deep green alfalfa, or along the furrows of a potato patch. We stopped and admired the beauty of the painstaking work.

‘Do you know what a
vergel
is?’ asked Paco.

‘Claro,’
said José.

‘No, I mean Cristóbal,
tonto
. Of course
you
know!’

‘What is a
vergel,
then?’ I asked.

‘It’s one of those old words that come from the Arabic,’ Paco explained. ‘Of course it is, it still sounds like Arabic and it means “garden” but with just a hint of art and a bigger hint of paradise. Anyway, these are
vergeles,
and by the time Chloë, Paz and Aretx have children they’ll all be gone, and with them the beauty and richness of these villages will be lost for good.’

Paco loves agriculture with a passion; he’s the sort of man who can be moved to tears by the sight of a well-made dung heap. To walk in the Alpujarras with him is a
revelation
. He will describe the different agricultural styles of men or villages as if they were painters or composers, each with his own distinctive signature.

From the endangered
vergeles
of Notáez we passed by means of an ascending zigzag path into wide open country with rolling hills of almond groves, teetering on the brink of the great gulf of air that separated us from the long range of the Contraviesa. This was what we had come to see. For
an hour or more we walked beneath a luminous cloud of blossom amongst the twisted black trunks of the trees. Larks sang invisible from high in the air above their nests, a cock crowed from a distant
cortijo
and the breeze sighed gently amongst the fronds of broom.

Apart from an occasional ‘ooh’ or ‘ay’, we didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say. To feast upon the beauty of the flowering almonds was the reason for our expedition. There seemed little point in telling one another over and again how impressed we were. Glutted with the loveliness of it all, we smiled inanely at one another now and then or watched with pleasure as José shook his head and whistled quietly to himself, or Paco, with a sprig of lavender behind his ear, caught some falling petals and pasted them to the sweat of his forehead. I suppose the air, too, was filled with the delicate scent of almond blossom, but I’ve never been able to smell it myself. Paco and José both swore that if you cut a branch of almond blossom and bring it into the house, it fills the room with a scent of marzipan and honey.

‘In Cástaras we’ll stop for sustenance… accompanied by the fine wines of the Contraviesa,’ announced José
importantly
. ‘Cástaras is just around the corner.’ But Cástaras was not round the corner, nor the next one. When finally we caught sight of the village it was time to sit down together and take another pull at the
bota.

Cástaras is the last village of the western Alpujarras – or the first, depending on where you’re coming from. Over the watershed begins the different landscape of the east, with its cinnabar mines and parched and deeply eroded hills.
As a counterpoint to the change, Cástaras is as lush as an Andalucian village can be. It’s set high on an impregnable rock in a forest of giant poplars, watered by the steep river whose sound fills the valley as it cascades from the
towering
cliffs above. Until a few years ago the place fell into almost complete abandonment as the population left in search of an easier, less isolated life. But new inhabitants have been trickling in, and little by little the pretty village is coming back to life.

We threaded our way through the narrow streets and came out in the main square, where a couple of plastic tables from the
posada
had been placed out in the sun. Both were occupied by couples engaged in gnawing on what looked like crusty rolls filled with omelette –
bocadillo
de
tortilla.
We decided to sit inside and drew up three stools to the bar. A tall thin youth with a mane of black hair emerged from behind a curtain, wiping his hands on a rather
questionable
-looking black cloth. He looked at us enquiringly.

‘Give us some wine,’ ordered Paco, ‘and we’ll drink while we think what we’re going to eat.’

Three small tumblers appeared, to be filled with a deep red wine from a jug that stood beneath the bar. For a
tapa
came a dish of home-cured olives – little black and purple
arbequinas.
They were delicious… it boded well. We drank a little wine and started to think about what we would like to eat.

‘Right,’ said Paco turning to me. ‘What do you make of the wine?’ I took a few little sips then held it up to the light.

‘Mmm,’ I mused. ‘I rather like it. It’s fruity and
full-bodied
and interesting with no sourness, and it’s a lovely deep red, as opposed to most
costas,
which are more…
brown.’ I hadn’t really a clue what to say. It tasted like a hundred other
costas;
but I knew all those words in both languages and they seemed not inappropriate.

Paco and José were both now looking at me with what I thought was a pitying sort of a look.

‘This is a foul wine, Cristóbal,’ said Paco.

‘Foul is too strong a word,’ said José. ‘It’s not that bad, but it might have been a little better a few months ago. You’ve got to drink these wines young; they only get worse with time.’

Paco sniffed the wine disdainfully. ‘Unless I’m mistaken,’ he said, ‘this one’s from Los Garcías de Verdevique. They usually do much better than this. I suspect it’s been in that
jarra
too long.’

He called into the kitchen: ‘Some more wine when you’ve a moment, but make it a different one this time.’ Out came the youth, wiping his hands on his cloth. He fished about for a minute beneath the counter, then came up with another
jarra.
Oddly enough he didn’t offer to change our glasses, but refilled them with the new wine.

‘So, what have you got for us to eat?’ asked Paco.

‘I can do you a
bocadillo de tortilla
if you don’t mind
waiting
a bit.’

We masticated this information.

‘What else have you got?’ asked Paco.

‘Nothing else, just
bocadillo de tortilla,’
came the practised reply.

We consulted one another, considering for a while the ramifications of this extensive menu. None of us
particularly
fancied
bocadillo de
tortilla.
The youth stood patiently by, chewing slowly. ‘Well then, what’s it going to be?’ he asked pleasantly as he refilled the tiny glasses.

‘Hmm,’ mumbled José. ‘It’s not an easy choice… but I reckon we’ll be having three
bocadillos de tortilla…’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Three
bocadillos de tortilla.’
And he wrote it down on a notepad and disappeared through the curtain.

The three of us were left alone in the bar. From a tinny loudspeaker came a radio programme of jazz and flamenco. We addressed ourselves once more to draining our glasses. This one was a more costa-like costa, pinkish brown and viscous. We all sipped and sat back. It really didn’t seem bad this time, but I decided not to commit myself; I would wait for the experts to pronounce their verdict. As I watched them they seemed suddenly to be suffused with pleasure, to swell a little with the bloom of well-being that a good wine brings you.