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Olga and Adela at Vicente Flors
Olga and I got the train so that we wouldn’t have to be making anxious calculations while enjoying Vicente’s Clotàs Tempranillo over lunch. Also Olga had never been to the town of Castellón. We caught the 9:32 at El Cabanyal Station in Valencia. I always enjoy how the line heading north emerges straight into huerta, the market farms that until recently surrounded and distinguished Valencia. A glimpse of a world that has almost gone.
Once past Sagunto and on into the province of Castellón, things become more industrial. Castellón is famous for its ceramic industry, which has been hard hit by the economic crisis. Few people know that Castellón was once internationally famous for its wine. When Olga told her dog-walking gang in the Parque Turia that she was visiting a winery there, they suggested she must have got it wrong. And this group includes some passionate Valencian patriots.
They don’t know how wrong they are. Vicente is a living embodiment of that tradition. Though he worked in banking until taking early retirement a few years ago, his bodega was lived in and worked by his grandfather, and his father carried on the winemaking. As we drove up towards Les Useres, Vicente pointed out ruined bodega after ruined bodega.
Old tools at Vicente Flors
We went straight to the vineyards, which are dotted about the locality – a reflection of his grandfather’s business acumen as he expanded his winemaking capacity and bought land. Vicente has some old Tempranillo vines, some Cabernet Sauvignon that he planted, and some very old Monastrell that he is planning to make wine with for the first time next year, with the help of Óscar Priego from El Angosto.
Vicente Flors at the Bodega
The handful of vineyards are surrounded by olive groves, and great swathes of almond trees, magnificent in their pink blossom at this time of year. There are also less eyecatching onion fields and barley fields. Vicente explained how all this had once been vineyards. In the sequence of devastations he listed came phylloxera, then the Spanish Civil War, when this countryside was turned into airfields and supply depots. This was followed by a boom in oranges which swept all before it, and finally a general exodus from agriculture to the more regular and lucrative, and less backbreaking, work in the factories on the coast.
Vicente could remember when there had been more vineyards than anything else, after the replanting at the end of the Civil War, and he’s no Methuselah. Indeed he is terrifyingly energetic. He works the almost 10 hectares of vineyards himself, doing all the pruning, the turning of the soil, the ceaseless vigilance, with the assistance of one local farmer, Pedro. Vicente says he is as happy as a sandboy working outside in his vineyards in this delightful valley with its wine-friendly microclimate. I have to say that his vines were noticeably more kempt than many of the others that we saw, that are kept up haphazardly, often by people who inherited land, but can only now work it rather haphazardly at weekends and such.
We visited the old family home and winery, that he is doing up as bodega and visitors’ centre. He has casks of French and American oak, and there are also gleaming old agricultural tools and machinery that had remained in the house. Adela, his wife, had yet to visit the upper part of the house since work started turning it into an office and visitor-cum-tasting area. It is going to have a great view from the back out across the hill-surrounded plain. The ever-restless Vicente is going to plant Garnacha on his land immediately behind the bodega.
We had time to see a couple more “parcelas” of old Monastrell, and then it was off to lunch at a restaurant that our host described as “algo peculiar”. I assumed that we were headed to some outpost of molecular gastronomy, but it turned out to be just the opposite. “Pou de Beca” is, as well as a restaurant adhering to the principles of the Slow Food movement, an “Espai Cultural Obert” (Open Cultural Space). It has art exhibitions, but the cultural aspect stretches further.
The restaurant is run by a cooperative of like-minded friends. We were served by Nicolás. The menu has a fifty-year old photo on the back showing his father and other friends and family, Nicolás told us how back then they had one of the few TVs around, and his father used to hang a white sheet outside when there was bullfighting being shown, and down everyone would come to watch the stars of the corrida in action.
Now it is a restaurant that is committed to local and seasonal produce, prepared respectfully and imaginatively. My starter of artichoke carpaccio was delicious and everything from cheeses, sundry meats to the assorted plate of puddings was authentic yet elegant. Poor old Vicente is not drinking alcohol these days (and they wouldn’t contemplate serving his preferred alternative, Coca-Cola, at Pou de Beca), so Adela, Olga and I enjoyed his powerfully inky and fragrant Clotàs, while he could only sniff his glass occasionally and forlornly. Vicente is one of those people who seems to know everybody. As a result of eating with him, Nicolás gave me a bottle of the wine that he makes for his own consumption, but sadly in the excitement I left it behind. Still it’s a good excuse to go again.
In a final gesture of hospitality, Vicente and Adela gave us a quick tour of the centre of the town of Castellón, before we caught the train home. Unfortunately, this was a slow train and we were too late to watch that night’s broadcast of “Dossiers” on Canal Nou, which was all about wine in the Comunitat Valenciana, and included an interview with Vicente, along with such superstar winemakers of the region as Quique Mendoza, Daniel Belda, Toni Sarrión, Rafa Cambra, Pablo Calatayud et al. Vicente’s is a romantic project involving the recovery of a local and family tradition, but it is serious winemaking and seriously good wine. It was a treat to have such a out of the ordinary Sunday in the country just an hour away from Valencia. We can’t wait to do it all over again.
