The Story of NR4 & NR5

I was not planning on making a Moscatel with Nova Radix. I used to be the first to say: “Anything but Muscat” because the Muscat family of grapes has a reputation. In the wrong place and hands, it can go full potpourri, with the kind of floral intensity that makes you wonder if someone fermented it in a soap store. 

That was until Leo told me the story of viña Flora and its old Moscatel bush vines and made me taste one of his skin-contact Moscatel wines.

When the first grapes were harvested from viña Flora in the summer of 1967, Salvador Allende was President of Chile. In Itata, small growers tended to small plots of old bush vines, inherited from their parents, who had inherited them from theirs. The grapes were turned into pipeño, simple but delicious table wine, made mainly for the family’s own consumption. 

“We are slowly repopulating this hill,” Zjos said with her typical warm smile. Teresa, her youngest, was strapped to her back. Emilia, the eldest, read quietly nearby, while Mathis and Esteban, her two boys, chased Almendra, the dog. It was siesta. The presses were still. We lay on the sun deck outside the bodega, the Pacific Ocean glinting in the distance.

It was the first thing I saw when entering the bodega: a gigantic wooden basket press looming over the amphoras and barrels, raised on a platform in the middle of the winery. The press is entirely operated by human force: the basket is filled with grapes and by moving a large lever back and forth, wooden pieces press the grapes gently down, and the juice escapes through the narrow slits in the basket before it is captured in the large sink underneath. It then travels by gravity to the fermentation vessels one floor down. 

Every Nova Radix Drop is shipped to your house in a cardboard box. And a thick one too, to avoid the bottles breaking in transport. In trying to save old vines Moscatel and País by selling wines directly to consumers, I was buying cardboard, fuelling the same industry that planted exogenous pine trees in faraway places with no regard for fire risk, and causing those same vineyards to go up in smoke. The irony.