Chapter 3 - Pulp Fiction

"Hay cafe" Carlos motioned when I walked into the kitchen of the bodega that morning. We filled our cups and walked outside to watch the sun rise over the hill opposite ours, before checking the fermentations. The hillside that had been dark green the morning before now had a yellow razed spot - a scar in the middle of the forest. "The machines cut trees day and night here" Leo explained, pointing at a crawling tractor taking down pines one by one in the distance. 

We had seen a machine turning an entire pine tree in a neat and clean trunk without needles or branches in seconds the day before. It had grabbed the tree with its claws and had shaken it wildly so its branches snapped off, and its bark was stripped. Standing in an old vineyard with vines left to grow untouched for decades worked entirely by hand, I found the scene obscenely violent. "What is the wood used for?" I had asked Leo. "It is turned into pulp for the paper and cardboard industry," he responded. It took me a minute to realize what that meant. 

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. 

We were wading through the wild vineyard with vines sprawling on the floor, intermingled with flowers and grasses. It was hard to see what was vine and what was weed. As we crossed to another vineyard, the weeds, grasses and flowers among the bush vines disappeared. "This neighbor sprays his vines", Leo said. With no weeds or grasses to fuel the fire, the blaze had spared this entire vineyard. "He kills the soil and is rewarded. I save the soil and my vineyards burn down," Leo said matter-of-factly. "Most grape growing families in Itata ripped out some of their vineyards to plant pine trees instead, because it makes them more money." 

The irony of Itata is everywhere.