488: Erin and the Volcano

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[00:01:05] Ill Drink to That, where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business. I'm Levi Dalton. I'm Erin Scala. And here's our show today. Did you know there is a huge volcano in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,

[00:01:30] and that all around the base of the island, these insane wines are farmed? And by insane, I mean some of the most pleasantly distinct wines I've ever tasted from the most extreme vineyards

[00:01:40] I've ever seen. And mind you, I'm someone who has actually slipped down the slates of the Urzuger Burtzgarten. I've seen lightning from the Rapsani vineyards on Mount Olympus. I just missed a mudslide on the way to a vineyard in Santa Cruz. In central Otago,

[00:01:52] I got sick on that hairpin turn on the Crown Range. I've been stung and bitten and cut by just about everything you can in a vineyard, and I've had to avoid the occasional bear, large cat,

[00:02:00] and snake. But the vineyards on this volcano set a new level of vineyard extreme that was difficult for me to process. The island, Pico Island, was once world famous for dry white wines

[00:02:13] and a passamento style wines called passato. There was a big wine heyday about 180 years ago and before. Then all of these wild things happened and the unique vineyards of Pico went mostly offline for over a century. Most of these historic vineyards have been sleeping until today when we

[00:02:31] find Pico about a decade into a wine renaissance. And the whole story about this island is so fascinating it's almost impossible to believe. From the multiple whale species that make the surrounding waters their playground, to the vines that pretty much grow in salt water,

[00:02:48] you'll find small pyramids all around the island, ancient ruins that wind through the jungle, and a history that takes us from the courts of Russian tsars to Australia. Also, the more recent volcanic eruptions there have launched a rich culinary tradition about soup. Yes, soup.

[00:03:04] All of this is a part of Pico's story. So come along with me, we're off to the middle of the Atlantic just next to the Gulf Stream. Here three tectonic plates meet and this is where you'll find the Azores Island Group.

[00:03:23] These islands spring up from weak points in the earth's crust. The older Azores have weathered down to these verdant hills and calderas and the vegetation is left behind these pockets of soil where a multitude of crops can grow. But the newest island in the group, Pico Island,

[00:03:39] named for the huge volcanic peak that towers over this small group of central islands, has a scant amount of vegetation because the lava is so fresh. It's got these vast slabs of black hardened lava layered and draped in thick dark sheets around the base of the island.

[00:03:55] A travel writer in 1889 wrote, there's not a single atom of substance deserving the name of soil on Pico. So how did this young volcano become the nucleus of one of Portugal's most interesting wine regions? To really understand the wine here, we'll need to go back to the beginning.

[00:04:20] It's generally accepted that the first Portuguese settlers arrived around 1427 and there's a mysterious vineyard site here called Pria São Vela which means ancient creation. And let me just say, walking in this vineyard it took my absolute breath away. I've never seen

[00:04:38] anything remotely like this place in my life. So imagine a flat floor of dark black lava with a three foot high maze wall made of loosely packed lava rocks. The maze wall covers most of the floor.

[00:04:51] The maze seems endless and labyrinthian but it's laid out in organized rectangles with higher walls denoting past property markers. A single vine sits in each room-like compartment and there are

[00:05:03] little breaks in the inner wall network so you can walk from one vine to the next. You have to be very careful not to step on the canes or the chutes. They're like spokes of a wheel. They sprawl out

[00:05:13] from the cordon head which is trained just a few inches from the surface of the ground. These walls protect the vines from the wind. There's no masonry on the walls, they're just jagged volcanic

[00:05:23] stones piled upon one another and the stones are so sharp that when you stack them they almost stick together as the jagged teeth of the stone bounce off the ground. The stones are so sharp

[00:05:33] that it bites into the holes in the other volcanic stones beneath it. So the wall's porous, it allows wind through to get some airflow but it also protects the vines from the intense winds that can come

[00:05:43] off the ocean. If we take a survey of travel writing through the centuries it's put many writers to the impossible task of describing these mysterious vineyards of Pico. In 1841 travel writer Joseph Boulard wrote, wherever you cast your eye hardly any other objects than stones

[00:06:06] meet it. If Pico had been the original heap of cinders that must have accumulated around Vulcan's furnace, it could scarcely be more blank and barren than are the stones in which the vines are planted. In 1843 the Massachusetts paper Newburyport Herald reported, the vineyards which cover this part of

[00:06:23] the island are cut up into little compartments by low walls of lava and in the place of soil there's little or nothing visible to the eye but the same broken fragments of volcanic cinders and lava.

[00:06:34] And the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1867, the base of the mountain appears to be covered with a coarse black network which might easily be mistaken for trellis work but as you approach shore

[00:06:46] the objects become more visible and this trellis work is seen to consist of low stone walls of black lava dividing the vineyards into small compartments. The meshes of the network which appeared to overspread the mountain. And the juiciest description by far is from Edgar Wakeman

[00:07:02] who wrote in 1889 in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, Pico Island looks like a black dunce's cap covered in gray lace. All of these descriptions are from travelers who first approached the island by boat from the neighboring island of Fayal and they landed in Maddalena, the nearest port, right near

[00:07:19] the ancient creation vineyard. Their first view of Pico Island being the mysterious Criassalvela site and its surrounding vineyards. It's no accident that the vineyards are just a few steps from the black cliff-like coastline that's relentlessly pounded with waves and wind. It's on

[00:07:37] the coastline where you find the lowest rainfall and the warmest temperatures. It's the perfect place for grapes to ripen on this island. The coastline is also raw. It is the worst place to

[00:07:47] have livestock or to plant crops like cereals and vegetables. There's some decent soil higher up the volcano and that's where you find the famous cattle of Pico and some vegetable production. Some of the only plants that can even think about growing in the harsh environment of Pico's coast

[00:08:02] are grapevines and fig trees. I recorded first stepping onto Criassalvela. Approaching this vineyard kind of stirs your soul in the same way that you might feel soulful as you approach Stonehenge

[00:08:15] or the pyramids at Chichen Itza and you can get a sense of the powerful landscape just by listening. So we're out here right on the edge of the vineyard and you can really hear the wind how it's picked up.

[00:08:40] It's almost howling across the vineyards at times and the ocean is breaking in the background. It's really a stunning landscape. Legally, Criassalvela is a municipality that encompasses the ancient vineyard at the coastline and it goes all the way up to the caldera of the volcano

[00:08:56] carving out a slice of the island just like a slice of pie. But when most wine people say Criassalvela, they're referring to the ancient vineyard site near the coast. And as we start visiting with

[00:09:06] winemakers on Pico, there's another word you'll need to know. Legido. The black lava slabs that pour over the coastlines and several parts of the island are locally called legido, which means slab in Portuguese. And the various legidos are usually referenced by their nearest town or

[00:09:23] landmark. So there's Legido Santa Luzia or the black lava slab right near Santa Luzia. There's the Legido do Criassalvela or the black lava slab where you find the ancient vineyard. Legido this, legido that and so forth. Each legido references a particular lava flow and because of

[00:09:41] this each legido has a different age and each legido has slightly different characteristics. It's a similar concept to the contradas that you'll find on Mount Etna. So when people say Criassalvela they're usually referring to the Legido do Criassalvela. And the Criassalvela

[00:09:57] is referring to the Legido do Criassalvela where the vineyards are. Now you might be wondering why is Erin talking about these legidos so much? It's because dear listener, I'm trying to help you avoid

[00:10:09] the mistake that I made. Pro tip when you're on Pico people don't always specify which legido you're at or you might be going to. Legido is essentially a soil type and places with legido

[00:10:20] soil tend to have legido in the name. And for some reason with this particular word I was very slow on the uptake and I just did not get the concept until much later. We'd be at one place and someone

[00:10:32] would be like this is legido. Then we'd go to another legido and I'd be like wait a minute weren't we just at legido? I figured it out after a while but I want you to be set up for success.

[00:10:45] So now you know. The ancient creation vineyard walls go back to at least the 1690s but nobody knows how old they really are. Think about it, archaeologists usually find clues in the soil

[00:11:03] but on lava rocks there's no archaeological record. No trash pits to uncover, no samples left behind in the mud. It's a blank slate of blank legido. So it's really very mysterious to be there wondering

[00:11:17] just how old this labyrinth could be. And just for fun here's a very speculative hypothetical. Let's probe even farther back in time. A recent discovery from core samples taken from Pico Island's Lake Pachino suggest that Norse settlers may have had livestock here around the year 800.

[00:11:36] Archaeologists have also just dated a Norse site in Newfoundland Canada to 1021. So there's some evidence of Norse travelers to and fro across the North Atlantic from around 800 to 1021 at least. And this is an ultra speculative thought but it does kind of make you ask the question

[00:11:52] just how old are some of these wall structures? But we'll play it safer today and say the 1690s. Or before. There are three main white grape varieties that you'll find on Pico Island.

[00:12:07] Orento from the Azores, Verdello, and Tarantege do Pico. If you've had Orento before this is not that Orento. This is a special kind of Orento from the Azores with a different genealogy called Orento dos Azores or Orento of the Azores. Acid heads and Riesling lovers you'll love Orento.

[00:12:26] Imagine if a Grossus Gavaix Nahei Riesling had a baby with the best Santorini Acertico you ever had. Orento dos Azores is packed with tight nervous animated power and it rushes in with this sort

[00:12:39] of green apple lip smacking tart zesty brightness and it seizes you and grabs you in a way that is so intense that you almost wonder did you drink the wine or did the wine drink you? It's trippy

[00:12:51] like reading Julio Cortazar's famous Ashelote story where he observes the salamander in the aquarium but by the end of the story they've switched souls and he is a salamander looking out of the aquarium at himself. That's what drinking good Orento is like. It's like a complete

[00:13:07] mind. Tarantese do Pico is completely different. If you've had Tarantese before this is not that Tarantese. This is a special kind of Tarantese that you only find on Pico called Tarantese do Pico.

[00:13:22] It's like a mandarin orange saline laser beam and in the glass it's this yellow topaz but in an extended harvest year it kind of almost glows with this deep internal fire like polished ancient

[00:13:35] amber. It's something precious to be admired and you enjoy Tarantese do Pico. You sense you're lucky to have a sip yet it's such a singularity that you kind of observe its glory from the outside.

[00:13:47] It doesn't come at you directly like Orento or Verdello. It sort of keeps a graceful distance and demands your respect. And then there's Verdello. If you've ever had Verdejo this is different. It's Verdello and you really only find it in the Atlantic islands. What does it taste like?

[00:14:05] Well the good ones taste like if awesome sauvignere and grand crucibly had a love child. The great ones are slick with this silky texture and there's a stealth acidity that kind of sneaks up and mysterious aromas almost hypnotize you like steam from hot stones,

[00:14:23] almond cake, financier cookies, salty seashells and they hit like waves just endlessly for weeks in your memory. It's a wine that washes over you just lapping at your soul until it almost laminates

[00:14:37] itself to your very being and you can't get it out of your head. Most of the 11 producers on Pico work primarily with these three grapes and you'll also find other grapes too like for now Pireges

[00:14:53] but the Azores Orento, the Verdello and the Pico Tarantese are the trinity of this particular volcano's pantheon. Now I just mentioned that there are 11 producers but that's not entirely accurate because pretty much every person who lives on Pico makes wine. Every household and

[00:15:14] family owns or their family owns grape vines and every family has an adega or a small house near their vines where they press the wine and store their family barrels so there are really thousands

[00:15:25] of winemakers on Pico but about 11 that make wine commercially. Wine growing and wine making is intertwined with everybody's life on the island. On Pico a lot of the residential areas are up higher

[00:15:40] on the volcano but the wine is made close to the sea where it grows best. During harvest time families will move down the volcano from their homes and they'll sort of camp out in their adegas.

[00:15:52] It's almost like glamping because they all come for several weeks to do the harvest and they live out of their adegas. On some parts of the island this annual pilgrimage is called

[00:16:02] the muda and it sort of means the moving. For a lot of people the time of the muda is a time of really special family memories. In the summer they don't have school they can go here with

[00:16:14] the father and the whole family comes to these houses. And when they move they would bring the chickens, the pigs, all the animals. They would bring, well of course this is not the same in every village

[00:16:30] because you have places that the coast is nearer the main population, the main village, but in places where it's a bit more far away that is not practical for you to walk every day just to feed

[00:16:44] the chickens or to feed the cats so they would move with all the animals, the domestic animals together Nearby the adegas they used to have little structures to have the pig, to have the chicken

[00:17:00] but just temporary. And then when the harvest is over then you get the bad weather then you got to move back up the mountain. When people do the muda they like to go glamping it's like fun, exciting

[00:17:12] Yes and people used to have like they start like having small communities here if we go around this small coastal area you see that there is a small chapel and then they have a party with

[00:17:27] festivity like a festival in this time of the harvesting time. So here at the end of the muda it's like now we must go home again let's go do make a party with everybody. When that we do the

[00:17:43] muda does it like do you come and does every family have their place they know where they're supposed to go it's not like there's no... No, no everybody has their house. And so you do the muda and it's sort of

[00:17:55] like you visit the friends of the muda might be different than the friends of the... Of course, of course It's like you have a vacation area in your own island. Yeah but it's not the same.

[00:18:08] It's certainly you have different neighbors yes. It's like Montauk or Nantucket it's all these places it's the same thing in New England. That was Vanda Supa, the director of environment and climate change of Pico and Monica Silva-Goulart she's an architectural expert of the Pico Island

[00:18:27] vineyards and you'll hear some stories from them throughout today's episode. Let's head over to Insula where Paolo Machado is making some insane wines. Paolo's wines rush you like a brick wall bam they are pure power taut and brilliant and there's so much energy boiling under the surface

[00:18:48] that it's tightly coiled and wound up and when you take a sip it sort of races out of the gates like a thoroughbred. These wines are no doubt very long-lived and they are stunners. Paolo is one of

[00:18:59] these guys who doesn't say much but you can sense this fiery life force within and his wines are pretty much the same. Imagine if Dwayne Johnson was a white wine that's pretty much Insula. I also

[00:19:09] tried some of Paolo's wine from the nearby island of Graziosa and kapow! The tooth bleaching acidity was just off the charts in a great way. Graziosa wines could probably fuel a Formula One car and win.

[00:19:22] These wines get their insane acidity because the soil is better on Graziosa so the yields are higher so with the higher yields the grapes don't ripen like they do on Pico so you end up with

[00:19:30] zing zang acidity and it really got me thinking about the endless potential for sparkling wine on Graziosa. We'll see maybe one day. Paolo is like a keystone to Pico's current state. He helped shape the rules of the CBR, the wine governing body of the Azores, and

[00:19:50] he's an all-around sort of champion of indigenous varieties. Paolo and I drove south to his winery, Insula, and we sat on a porch right next to one of his vineyards. These walls are such a feature of

[00:20:01] these Pico vineyards. We talked about wines and winemaking and in the distance you could see the sun reflecting off the ocean like glass. Since very young I helped my grandfathers and my father to

[00:20:15] making wine. When I go study I go to agriculture school and I come back start working with the viticulture and changing the old vineyards. They are with hybrid, American hybrids, and I change to Vinifera, to Verdolio and Berinto and the others.

[00:20:40] And I start making my own wines and I always going to Portugal mainland to learn more about winemaking. I always have that dream of bottle my wines. Here you are!

[00:21:00] In the last year or this year, last year and the other, I don't use the commercial yeast, just with local. So the process is very easy and I'm very focused on vineyards. I have good grapes, always

[00:21:22] my passion is to produce grapes. I know my grapes, I believe in my grapes so I don't change many things. Pico volcano is not perfectly centered on the island and Paulo's vineyards are still pretty

[00:21:40] close to the coast but they're not exactly on the coast. You kind of have to drive inland a little bit to get to them. Not too far but the radius from where his vineyards are to the caldera is

[00:21:49] much shorter than from Cria Salvela and just those few kilometers of proximity to the caldera of the volcano really make a difference in the acidity. Closer to the caldera you get a little

[00:22:01] bit higher acid, farther from the caldera you get a little bit more ripeness. So oh I see, I see, okay so this is so close to the volcano top. So this is one of the closest places to the peak. Okay, okay.

[00:22:16] So one of the things that I've been sort of figuring out is that like the closer you are to the peak the higher acid your wines are typically because it's colder, it's a cooler climate and then like

[00:22:26] the farther you are from the peak on the island your wines are richer more generous but it all changes in a year like 19 when you have the extended period in the vineyard because of the

[00:22:39] rain. Yeah. It's so interesting like how even just a couple kilometers from the volcano top can affect acidity so much. Paolo also helped found the Azores Wine Company with Felipe Broca and Antonio Mazzanita. So let's head over to Maddalena and chat with Antonio about the Azores Wine Company.

[00:23:00] Antonio is half Azorean and he's a major force in jump-starting the wine industry on Pico. He'll tell you all about it in a couple of minutes and you can also get more of his story

[00:23:08] in his interview with Levi in episode 450 but I want to lead in with some insights into the winemaking at the Azores Wine Company to contextualize what's happening there. So before we head over there it's time for a quick nerd alert.

[00:23:25] I can't really tee up why the wines are special at the Azores Wine Company without laying out the science behind them so we're going to take about three minutes and have a quick

[00:23:34] nerd moment. When I first tasted these wines it was the texture that really stood out and Antonio has taken cues from recent production using oxidation methods on the freshly pressed grape juice. In wine speak we call the unfermented grape juice the must. To use oxidation methods it's pretty

[00:23:49] simple you simply don't add preservatives to protect the must against oxidation and you let it naturally experience oxidation as it's coming out of the press and as you're working with it. Imagine you're making apple juice and you slowly press the apple juice and it sort of slowly turns

[00:24:03] brown in your cup that's kind of what's happening but what exactly is happening to the must during this process? Let's phone an enologist. I'm going to call Dr. Joy Ting and ask her what's up.

[00:24:15] Hey Joy how's it going? Good. Joy when we start talking about oxidation what are we really talking about here on like an atomic level? So when we're thinking about oxidation and reduction when we talk about those things in wine we're really borrowing from a vocabulary that comes

[00:24:33] from chemistry. In chemistry the idea of oxidation and reduction really has to do with where the electrons are spending most of their time within a covalent bond. So for example if we have a sulfur atom that's bonded to two hydrogen atoms the sulfur atom the nucleus of

[00:24:56] the sulfur atom is big it has a lot of protons in it the hydrogens only have one proton they're pretty small and it turns out in that case even though they're sharing electrons those electrons

[00:25:08] are sort of orbiting around both the sulfur and the hydrogen atoms that the electrons are spending more of their time with the sulfur nucleus than they are with the hydrogen nuclei. Joy can we

[00:25:21] think of that almost like gravity with like electrons as orbiting bodies? Yeah it's a we can think of it like gravity there's a couple of other things that are that are going into

[00:25:30] which atoms are more nucleophilic or which ones are going to hog the electrons more often but it is somewhat like gravity in that sense. I used to think about it like sharing something with

[00:25:41] your sibling like there's always one sibling who shares a little bit less equally than the other sibling so that's how I used to think about it when I was teaching my high school students. Bevan Joy's talking about you.

[00:25:57] So we there's just lots of ways of thinking about sort of how we do that but unequal sharing is really what it is. But anyway so electrons are negative they're negatively charged and so if the

[00:26:07] electrons hang out more with one atom than the other they have more electrons they're more negative so they're reduced. So when we think about chemically oxidation and reduction they're paired processes in any given chemical bond one of the atoms is going to be oxidized while the

[00:26:27] other one is going to be reduced. A lot of time we call it oxidation because oxygen is one of the one of the biggest electron hogs there are there is around so if oxygen is around it's gonna hog

[00:26:39] the electrons from everybody else and oxidize everything else that that is around it but there's other things that are also oxidizers. Oxygen is acting as the oxidizer it itself is actually becoming more reduced because the electrons are spending more time with the oxygen.

[00:26:59] So we're kind of confused over here about must oxidation can you let us know what's going on like inside of the grape juice? When you press white grapes the juice is going to flow out and

[00:27:11] go into the press pan when that happens the oxygen from the air basically will dissolve into that juice as it's being released from the press into the pan. When that's happening the oxygen will interact with a number of different components in that juice so anything

[00:27:32] that oxygen is going to bind to it's going to go and find and bind to it and the most prevalent things in there are the things the oxygen is going to find first. So depending on what's in

[00:27:41] your juice you might have different effects of oxygen on that juice and on the the wine that comes from it. So there are some aromatic compounds that when they bind with oxygen they become less aromatic but the other thing that's happening the oxygen will also bind to

[00:27:57] any of the phenolics that might be in the juice. So in white wines we have hydroxycinnamic acids and we have some sort of smaller phenolics the ones that that we would really be thinking about

[00:28:09] though in terms of allowing oxygen would be some of the larger phenolics that would give astringency and sometimes bitterness to the wine. The more pressure that's used during the pressing cycle

[00:28:20] the more is being extracted from the skins of the grapes and it's the skins of the grapes that have more phenolic compounds. When those interact with oxygen they'll basically they'll brown up

[00:28:34] so you'll see the juice gets brown but when that juice gets pumped into the tank and settled those will actually kind of some of them will form precipitates and settle to the bottom of the tank.

[00:28:45] So then when the winemaker goes and racks the juice off of the lees he or she is really leaving behind a lot of those phenolics and therefore that juice is less likely to brown later because

[00:28:58] you've taken out browning components. So it's a way of allowing more extraction of other things from the skins but getting rid of some of the astringency that would be coming along with that. I've noticed that many winemakers who use must oxidation methods seem to also be looking for

[00:29:15] a reductive elavage. The two processes seem to go hand in hand. It almost seems intuitive to the winemaker that after putting the must through oxidation you want to give it an extra safe

[00:29:25] reductive elavage which is easiest to do by aging the wine with the lees or the spent yeast cells. Now I do want to acknowledge that the word reduction is complicated. It means different things in different scenarios to different people and there are different kinds of reduction. In this

[00:29:39] particular segment I'm referring to the reductive environment created by aging wine with the lees for long periods of time. Joy from what I understand this is because the yeast are starving for oxygen and they eat it all up creating a fairly oxygen-free environment.

[00:29:54] Is this what's going on during reductive lees elavage? Well not really. So the yeast themselves they are hungry for oxygen so when the yeast are active during fermentation they very quickly consume all of the oxygen in the environment and the yeast themselves actually

[00:30:15] need oxygen to have healthy cell membranes to be able to finish a fermentation and handle the difficult environment at the end of fermentation so high alcohol low nutrient that sort of thing. But when you're talking about long aging on the lees the yeast aren't really

[00:30:35] active anymore. They're either not doing anything or they're dead so they're not consuming the oxygen in a metabolic sense anymore. They're not using that oxygen to make energy or to make cell components or anything like that. Probably what's happening with yeast elavage is that

[00:30:54] the components of the yeast cell bodies are all still in there so even though the yeast are dead you've left all of the yeast cell bodies in there. The carcasses. The carcasses yes and and they're slowly breaking down over time but there's many different components in the yeast

[00:31:13] cell bodies themselves that will bind oxygen. As soon as the oxygen is bound to the yeast cell bodies it's no longer circulating around and interacting with aroma compounds or phenolic compounds or feeding spoilage characters that might be in the wine as well.

[00:31:33] So one of the reasons we like to use long aging on the lees would be just to bring down that oxygen environment to prevent spoilage and to prevent further oxidation of the wine that's in

[00:31:47] there. So just to paraphrase what I think I'm getting from you is what you're saying is that during a passive oxidation of the must we're using oxygen to bond to phenolics and drop those

[00:31:57] compounds out of the must then in the elavage we're using lees to bond to oxygen and drop that out of the wine. Yes that would be a good way to think about it. This larger idea of oxidative must

[00:32:10] treatment followed by a period of reductive elavage it's a concept I've noticed reverberate around the wine world for the last decade. Then almost intuitively as I mentioned before winemakers who see oxidation in their musts they take a mental about face and in the next phase they

[00:32:26] almost instinctively aim for a reductive elavage to balance the oxidation the wine has just been through. This combination when applied on high acid and high sugar grape varieties like Riesling, Petit Bonsang, Oryntodosazores it tends to make a big difference in the fruit presentation,

[00:32:41] the aromatic complexity, and it enhances the perception of density and acidity. It also appears to increase ageability. We see this similar approach used often for Riesling in the Finger Lakes by for example Nancy Ireland at Redtail Ridge, Ben Jordan has applied this

[00:32:56] strategy to Petit Bonsang at Early Mountain in Virginia, and I'm sure there's countless additional examples of oxidative must plus reductive elavage. Drop them in the comments if something else comes to mind we would love to check out your examples. Now it may sound complex but must oxidation and

[00:33:11] lease aging are pretty simple and kind of ancient concepts. They're common sense must and wine adjustment methods that can require very little or even no intervention. You simply let the must oxidize and then you leave it with the lease during its elavage. Pretty simple. And interestingly to my

[00:33:27] palate when you taste wines made this way though they have been exposed to oxidation in must form and reduction in wine form the paradox is that you rarely taste hints of either of these things. You

[00:33:38] rarely taste hints of oxidation or reduction. It's almost like it creates a perfect balance where the two concepts neutralize each other and what you end up with is an ever unfolding wine with layers and layers of dense texture. This approach is what Antonio is doing at the Azores

[00:33:52] Wine Company but what's different here is that this is intentionally being applied to the middle pressing. Antonio splits the pressings into roughly three parts with the first free run making one the middle pressing sees that extended elavage on the lease and the third is usually reserved

[00:34:09] for fortified wines. It reminds me so much of like a distiller's mindset where they pull the prized heart off the still and then they treat the heads and the tails differently. But what is

[00:34:20] actually happening during a pressing and how are the beginning middle and end cuts of the juice pressings different from one another? The first juice usually called the free run tends to have the lowest pH or the highest acidity and is usually favored. The middle and late pressings

[00:34:34] the pH goes up and the wine becomes less stable. So compare Antonio's approach at Azores Wine Company to so many other wine regions where it's the free run that's prized because of the low pH

[00:34:44] but here you definitely get more flavor extraction from the skin in the middle pressing and specifically at this winery to my palate perspective it really seems like the middle pressings hit some magical zone which is enhanced with the reductive lease aging.

[00:34:58] In our conversations Antonio mentioned a couple of times that on Madeira the end press fraction is highly prized for its flavor but in most wine regions it's despised for its gnarly pH, its tannins and its semi-oxidative notes. So it almost takes someone with an Atlantic Island

[00:35:13] mindset who is savvy with fortification who has a bit of a deeper interest in the flavors of the later press fractions. It takes someone looking through this lens to flip the standard paradigm

[00:35:23] on its head and to place a higher value on the middle and late pressings. He also intentionally uses these special oblong elavage vessels to increase the lease contact and that really turns up the volume on that reductive elavage. This deft approach to winemaking is both historical

[00:35:40] and technical. This approach is also a bit interesting because it seems so simple and commonsensical but it also seems kind of complicated the way it all comes together kind of like most things on Pico Island. And there's another thing going on with these wines

[00:35:56] and that's off the charts potassium levels. This is more of a terroir thing that you taste than anything that has to do with the winemaking but it certainly influences the flavor. And when you taste these wines especially the middle pressing cuvées that are denoted as

[00:36:10] surly it's like another world. It's like taking the red pill in the matrix. It's like if the sacral chakra itself became embodied in wine form and then somewhere on the mid palate just kind of blasted off into like a slow motion supernova forever overwriting and

[00:36:26] recasting your white wine experiences in some completely new galaxy except for DeMorale Cote. Okay now that you know why these wines are extra special let's hear about how it all started with a few dozen vines of almost extinct Torontes do Pico. And if you remember from earlier Torontes

[00:36:42] do Pico is the grape variety that's like a mandarin orange saline laser beam. Azorean half Alentejo. We say a lot if you're born in Lisbon you're from nowhere so meaning you're not from some place here. And my father is from Azores, my mother is from Alentejo

[00:37:06] and I always felt although I feel very comfortable in the capital I always felt that my roots were somewhere else. By 2000 I was already in university I tried to plant a vineyard in

[00:37:17] Sao Miguel island on a slope overseeing the ocean so inaccessible you can only go there walking or by boat so pretty intense stuff with some friends from university but a storm had a nice way of saying come back when you're ready burned everything that we grafted.

[00:37:39] So 10 years passed since 2000 and 2010 when I did my first wine in Sao Miguel and my paths crossed with the Philippe three years before so Philippe director of the hospitality school of the Conta Delgada invited me to go and do food and wine pairing was food

[00:38:01] and wine pairing within in a festival because I used to work with some restaurants some that I still work today on we actually learned together on food and wine pairing and so I came to do it

[00:38:13] was a day like meat with everything and fish with everything and so we really got along me Philippe also his team and I started to come and teach for a class on first introduction to wine and second

[00:38:30] and it was for chefs not for service it was getting chefs. Philippe wanted to introduce this on the resume of chefs they needed to know how to taste wine and they needed to understand why is it

[00:38:42] important this connection between wine and food and wine and so it's really nice for me because also was not about giving them library of wines but more like the capacity to put them in certain

[00:38:56] drawers acid wines more textured wines more tannic more alcohol so kind of putting it in a way that they can ask the front of the room so you know I really need a wine like this and so we did this

[00:39:09] and and I was really fortunate to spend more time in in São Miguel I started to be aware that there was this grape called Terentejo do Pico that was almost extinct and there was a a massive field

[00:39:23] of recovering this grape in progress so I got in contact with the responsible of this this field and she said maybe there's a reason why this grape almost disappeared is that you can't do

[00:39:33] great wine with it and I think this was the call to action that I was looking for and I said okay so um what if we do a project here so we launched a protocol with the with the local government with

[00:39:48] the it's the services of agricultural services of São Miguel island to do a wine out of that grape so we are in 2010 and I think this is kind of the seed to what happened after and of course

[00:40:04] the first wine was a huge surprise for me because I started making wine in Alentejo in 2004 so it's my sixth year and I was not into forcing it to be something I was I really wanted to test it

[00:40:16] let's just see what it can give let's just to clean the winemaking let's just you know sort the fruit the distemper was full of crap inside so let's do nice winery hygiene let's try to

[00:40:29] keep a nice cool fermentation that Felipe was very handful as well because I called him I need ice and he said how much ice I said I don't know like a ton one hour after there was a truck

[00:40:43] bringing ice from the fisherman to cool our tank and so so there was no cooling system so this was how we called it for for the first years and I would say that now we're here in the winery some

[00:40:56] fast forwarding it starts here it starts by testing the potential of the island and and we were lucky because the grapes that resisted here and the place is so unique that you can taste it

[00:41:08] and so this is my my first sensation it could have been a product that wasn't noble but when I tasted the first wine I said like this this is really wow you can some places have more terroir

[00:41:20] than others and and having more terroir is this sense of uniqueness and so really we got really well accepted by I would say more the community than critics but but also more I'd say I'd say sommelier community and restaurants and really got excited about tasting terroir

[00:41:45] tasting sense of place by 2013 so moving from San Miguel to Pico I came here to do a workshop on wine with the with the producers and really really interesting so it was a conversation four day or

[00:42:00] three day conversation on on what was I said and I'm going to take this as a consultancy you know like just let's just see what are the problems you know what's the cost of producing a kilo of fruit

[00:42:12] what's you know just go through all the steps and found out an immense history that I didn't I wasn't aware because I'm from San Miguel and my mind is that that that glorious past I wasn't

[00:42:26] there was a story about the casar and that's as far as I went and um but to know that adding to the people wrote in the back label was actually adding to the source and it was a different grape

[00:42:40] I didn't know that so so it's kind of discovering rediscovering that there are three indigenous grapes rediscovering that it was not just fortified wines that were made in the past that there was

[00:42:50] also still wines and that there was still an industry there was still continuity and so the co-op assured that the wines made it up to here you know and and the vignette the hybrids assured

[00:43:05] that people would still do viticulture so it's kind of each part of the process as a as a very important role for us and um and so when we arrived in in 13 I actually launched the project

[00:43:19] with the help of Philippe to it would be like free consultancy hours to producers this was the idea like I thought this with very little we can really change this this region because most of the

[00:43:31] problems they're just small analogical faults or um just we can really do this but no one accepted my free consultancy hours and so um so I called I called up Paulo Machado uh our partner except

[00:43:53] except no Paul yeah yeah except Paul and so I called him and said what do you want to do a wine together so at 2013 it was our first vintage doing at into the source so testing a different

[00:44:04] another grape and uh and that was really uh of course the vantage peak was really important for it but it could have stayed as small of what what we were doing in in in in Sao Miguel but um

[00:44:18] at into the source testing that grape and understanding that it's an amazing grape as well and there was a lot of it still planted and made me think well that makes sense you know

[00:44:31] it's more resistant than the others it's higher acid so it's just it made uh made sense uh that was still going and gave us the opportunity opportunity to to to decide me Felipe and Paul

[00:44:43] say well let's let's really make a wine company here and not not just one wine or another and um and so what was the drive the drive is I think what has been Felipe's job his entire life and

[00:44:57] what has been Paulo's job his entire life that is to promote the source and taking it to to another step and I think when we got the three together with this idea of putting the wines of Azores in its rightful place um what have we made different

[00:45:13] I think respecting the fruit so really making sure that we we have nice healthy fruit and this is not easy when the economy chain doesn't make sense so when we arrived grapes were between 70 cents

[00:45:27] and one euro something that is expensive for for European standards but but it's very different from being two and a half to four and then it starts making sense to everyone that you you take

[00:45:39] all the rot out that you do all the work that you should be doing and just making sure you have nice fruit nice healthy fruit and after not trying not trying it to be something so I would say that

[00:45:52] what do you call like the fish chasing its tail I think a lot of what was happening before we started making wine in Azores was trying to make Azores wines look like warm region wines

[00:46:07] so trying to bend it for to make the market like it and instead of just saying you know it's exactly the opposite it's just like let's just accept what it is let's put it in a bottle

[00:46:18] and you'll see but the public wasn't here you needed to go you need to put those wines in the most demanding markets in the capitals and so and so I think that's our biggest contribution is

[00:46:30] accepting Azores wines like they are you know with their potential with their you know you smell a wine from Azores you have this low tide sometimes reduction of ocean low tide you know this

[00:46:45] uh and is it the quality or fault and it's for us it's for sure quality but seriously the best wines from here will leave you thinking what the just happened in fact a few years ago biologists

[00:47:02] discovered this piece of our genome that all living creatures share it's some mitochondrial snippet of DNA-like material smaller than bacteria they traced this small piece of genetics back to a concept they call Luca or the last universal common ancestor. Luca, they suspect, was a tiny

[00:47:21] organism that lived deep in the ocean around thermal vents heated by magma seeping up through the ocean floor so in a weird way if you love the wines from Pico it's sort of like a primal ache

[00:47:31] deep within your DNA recalling the old days four billion years ago of pure microorganismal existence where magma meets the ocean. There's also a new generation of winemakers on the island and it really feels kind of silly to say that since the first generation is literally just a

[00:47:48] few years into their wine renaissance and yet there they are a second generation bright-eyed and full of life force and creativity. A lot of them worked or still work at the Azores Wine Company

[00:47:59] and you can see their unbridled creativity in the aftershocks of those wines. Let's go meet Katia Laranjo. I caught up with Katia over lunch she is an Azores Wine Company alum and she makes wine

[00:48:14] with her brother's vineyards and her own vineyards under the label Etnam launched in 2021. Her lineup is an interesting mix of classic approach and avant-garde approach. So in March of this year I started to plant my only vineyard near of the vineyards of my brother and my passion

[00:48:33] born there with my dad when I was young helping in all the vineyards pick up the grapes the pruning and all the work stuff at vineyards. So it's very hard viticulture there because we are very near

[00:48:50] to the ocean and sometimes so we are in Azores a lot of storms in the winter in the spring and they spray a lot of salty water from there so we don't have curaix it's it's more hard to work

[00:49:04] there. So Katia just mentioned this word curaix it essentially means corral and it refers to the small boxes of walls around each vine the sort of inner grid work. She tells the story of how in an

[00:49:16] effort to jumpstart agriculture several decades ago the government gave incentives for people to rip out their ancient curaix the inner network and keep the outer vineyard walls. The next step was

[00:49:26] to fill in the larger box the larger walls with imported soil and almost make like a raised plant bed. So it's bureaucracy so the government before UNESCO world heritage gave you money to destroy

[00:49:39] the curaix and made the vineyards like all the countries for example to the midland in Alentejo. For Katia's label Etnam she's working with vineyards that have no curaix. It's not a traditional vineyards you can found in Pico island so it's vineyards without curaix because it's a vineyard

[00:50:04] planting before UNESCO world heritage so it's before 2004 it's the year all the the landscape of vineyards from Pico island it's UNESCO. Monica and Vanda also talk about this and how it changed

[00:50:21] the island when people cleared their curaix they had nowhere to put the stones so they built these interesting pyramids called moroeso. So when you can't find archaeological evidence of former vineyards in some places you can sort of safely guess that if you see a moroeso pyramid the large

[00:50:35] empty plot next to it was probably once a vineyard site. In theory it might have been a good idea for agriculture but without the curaix the plants don't have enough protection from the wind and

[00:50:45] the sea spray because they're planted literally right next to the ocean so the plan kind of backfired and it actually made it more difficult to farm some of these plots by the sea. Today the

[00:50:53] Criaçao Velha site and the surrounding areas has been recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site and because of this in certain zones you can't really rip out curaix anymore.

[00:51:02] Moroeso, I have I have a moroeso in my neighbor in my neighbor they have a huge one yeah it's very beautiful very beautiful. And I also spent a lovely afternoon with Andre Ribeiro and Ricardo Pinto from Entrepiedras.

[00:51:19] These dudes are hilarious it's like watching stand-up comedy and if you're listening John Lockwood Ricardo is your doppelganger. I was literally like what the what is John Lockwood? Ricardo's from the mainland but he did harvest on Pico in 2019 and has sort of stuck around ever since.

[00:51:50] Andre is from the Azores and he and Ricardo started buying grapes and making their own wines in this cool mountain town on the north coast that kind of has both Tuscan and English

[00:51:59] seaside vibes to it. The duo bottle ages their wines in you know a cave of lava that's in one of Andre's family's vineyards. So yeah cave aged wine where else can you say you have like lava

[00:52:11] cave aged wine? Their wines are crystalline and dense and mineral driven and you feel as if they've literally been squeezed from pure stone which if you look at the vineyards it's kind of pretty

[00:52:25] accurate. Ricardo and Andre took me on an adventure to the Bay of Canes this crazy place on the island where there's almost like a rainforest that saunters precariously up the steep side of the

[00:52:36] volcano but a pretty recent eruption pushed a fresh black lava stream a logito through the vegetation over the cliff and created a lava delta almost like a peninsula a flat black rock that spilled

[00:52:48] out into the Atlantic like a giant lily pad. So now I'm in a car driving through the crazy terrain with Andre Ribeiro and Ricardo Pinto. They work for the Azores wine company but they also have

[00:53:03] their own label they're part of like this new generation who buys grapes and does their own label called Entrepedras. Between rocks. Between rocks and if you don't immediately get what that label means

[00:53:17] you do once you're in the vineyard because you're between rocks from all directions. Oh my god this is so beautiful we just turned the corner and there's this insane bay so we're in a particular

[00:53:27] lava flow and this lava that we're on right now is from a volcano that erupted in 1562. Right next to the fresh flow is an old bay with lava rocks that have been wave tossed for thousands of years so

[00:53:42] the beach is made of large round stones. Bamboo-like canes grow there and it's called Bay of Canes. Okay so we're actually in the Bay of Canes now and the Caniche are all around us. They're like

[00:53:53] bamboo plants that kind of rise up out of the volcanic rock and there's a huge cliff behind us like a soaring incredible cliff just amazing and you can see all the lava stones kind of billowing

[00:54:04] down from this cliff and then in the Bay of Canes when you look to the left you see where the lava flow from the 1562 eruption came down and spilled into the sea creating all this new land. The beach

[00:54:16] here is covered with these round stones or these rolled stones that they were talking about that are like black and gray and pockmarked. They look like mini moons it's so beautiful it almost looks landscaped but it's not. It's totally natural it's unbelievable and the vineyard on the Lugito

[00:54:34] right next door is called the Bay of Canes vineyard. Andre and Ricardo farm this wild vineyard on the lava lily pad and the grapes go into the Azores Wine Company bottlings. The intensity of farming

[00:54:46] here really sunk in as we toured the site. Wow look at this this is nuts okay you got to watch your footing here you can't just stroll on this beach. You need boots yes okay I'm gonna make it out

[00:55:05] now my crispy lava stones okay I survived. Andre mentioned that you need a new pair of shoes every three months because constantly walking on the crispy edged stones can really rip up your souls

[00:55:20] and this was a point not lost on our 1889 travel writer Edgar Wakeman who dedicated a large portion of his article on the Azores to a segment called Big Boots Just The Thing. He wrote then and it is

[00:55:32] just as meaningful today. Always be provided with an honestly made pair of boots wear them under your tramping trousers and always have the soles heavily spiked with iron nails you may not cavort

[00:55:43] about like a shepherdess but you will be able to hump along quietly and reach the place you started for while your companions and guides are limping painfully behind to remove sections of knife-like cinders from between their bleeding toes. I wanted to include what Wakeman wrote about needing boots

[00:56:00] on Pico because the vineyards are like walking on razor blades at times. These are some of the hardest vineyards to farm on planet earth. Andre and Ricardo are deeply involved in the viticulture for the Azores Wine Company so when you taste these supernova wines at Azores Wine Company

[00:56:18] you really think back to the work that these two do in the vineyards. Their own label Entrepiedras is based on a lot of contracted fruit and I use the word contract lightly they explain that contract

[00:56:28] is usually beers at a cafe and maybe a handshake. So many magical things in the world happen over beers in a cafe. They also apply some techniques they've learned at the Azores Wine Company to their

[00:56:40] own wines like the oblong tanks for liese aging some of the varieties because they know they want to make that good wine. And when you taste the Entrepiedras wines you get echoes of the Azores

[00:56:52] Wine Company wines but you also get this sense of fresh unbridled energy completely beautiful and youthful and soulful. I got a rough estimate that the 11 commercial producers on the island also source fruit from approximately 300 growers and in a way because Entrepiedras is quite a bit

[00:57:08] of contracted fruit from many local farmers plus some family vineyards it's almost like experiencing the voice of the island where the fruit of many locals is able to sing together in chorus. Talking with the people who live on Pico there's this interesting theme that kept coming up

[00:57:31] everyone sort of joked about how they felt like working the vineyards was a chore growing up but then something happens when they switch and start to get nostalgic about the vineyards and

[00:57:39] realize how special they are. As we drove along the north coast of Pico you'll hear the sounds of André elaborated on that feeling and process that seems central to the Pico experience. And there's this common feeling that I felt and my father felt

[00:57:57] that when you're young you hate going to the vineyards because you don't want to work at all you just want to have fun be with your friends this and that but as you get older you understand the passion of the old people for the vineyard there's a

[00:58:17] certain peace into it and it's like an art that you start from the beginning to the end and every year is different and there's a lot of sorrow sometimes but there's a lot of happiness

[00:58:30] other times and you you get really engaged into it when you get to a certain age and once you you are engaged I think your parents or grandparents they can die peacefully because they know you're gonna you're gonna continue the work that they've done

[00:58:55] for years it's almost like in the blood you understand them after a few years but there's always that phase that you hate going to the vineyard oh not this again oh the harvest is almost here oh and is it sort of like you're obliged to go

[00:59:19] yes work your harvest for your family you had no chance you had to work to the family and you back back then you didn't even drink wine but you had to help

[00:59:37] One afternoon Paulo Machado and I drove along the coast and we marveled at how close the vineyards were to the ocean. They're grown on these little plateaus, these little cliffs that rise up right from the water's edge. How close the vineyards are from the ocean?

[00:59:54] So close. We pulled off and drove closer to the edge of the cliff and came to Lucas Lopes Amaral's Adega. He's 20 years old and he just came out with his first commercial vintage and one of his

[01:00:06] earliest memories is of being in the vineyard. Here's a little excerpt from our chat translated by Paulo Machado. He says his first memory it was right here in this vineyard he remembers maybe around three years old he comes with his grandfather to pick the grapes and

[01:00:32] he it was with a scissor he cut the his hand and he remembers with three years old he comes to pick grapes and cut the hand with a teaser. I also caught up with Tito Silva. He's in the furniture

[01:00:52] business but he also makes wine from family vineyards. Tito has sort of gone all in on Terrantes Tropico. He's planted quite a bit of it. We caught up over dinner and Fortunato Garcia translated our conversation.

[01:01:14] We had very few plants in the island so pretty much everybody quit having Terrantes because it was so fragile and the truth is when he was talking to me and we talked a lot about it I was

[01:01:28] would always tell him the same story. Terrantes is the one that's not going to give you wine every year but when it gives you wine it's going to be something out of the box and so the option was okay

[01:01:39] so let's have Terrantes and let's start having Terrantes. There's one producer who's a little bit different than all the others. They're a couple who moved to Pico and open up an elegant bohemian

[01:01:51] hotel called Pocino Bay. It has some vineyards and they make their own wine and what they do is kind of different than everyone else. The wine they make seems to be mostly for their hotel guests

[01:02:01] so you'll be lucky if you ever find some but these wines are just like these precious jewels. They're made by Jose Eduardo and Luisa Terra. Everything they do is like a labor of love

[01:02:12] and this really shows through in the wines. Jose explains how there's this traditional blend of the three grapes on the island and he puts them together in sort of the ancient recipe of Pico.

[01:02:24] I caught up with Jose and Luisa over lunch at a busy restaurant. You'll hear the bustling sounds of the kitchen in the background and it kind of epitomizes the tension between chaos and calm

[01:02:34] that pervades every part of life here from the weather to the wine. They used to say to make a very good wine you should have seven parts of a rinto, two parts of verdelho and one of Terrantes.

[01:02:45] There's this mathematical formula for a good wine. That's what I'm trying to do. Yes it's from the ancient ones before the phylloxera, before all the before the grapes disappear from here. The first ones, the wine that they used to export to the Khazar of Russia and so

[01:03:03] they had that formula, seven to one. In the last hundred years or so a wild forest has overgrown most of the 19th century vineyards but slowly the people here are reclaiming the vineyards, cutting down the new trees and revealing

[01:03:19] the old lava walls trapped in the jungle. You'll see lava rock vineyards with blocks of jungle next to them and if you peer into the trees you can see the lava rock labyrinth winding through

[01:03:31] the jungle, evidence that it was once recently a vineyard too. It's quite a bit of work to clear the overgrowth and reveal the vineyard site underneath but enough has been cleared away

[01:03:43] in the last decade or so that you can really get an idea of what it might have looked like when this island was in full wine production mode in the early 1800s and the job continues.

[01:03:54] Slowly the locals are peeling back the jungle to reveal the vineyards of Central Asia. But you might be wondering how did it get this way and why were most of the vineyards overtaken

[01:04:05] by forest in the first place? Why did this once famous island of wine become a jungle? Something big happened on Pico to completely change the economy like that. What on earth could occur that is so devastating that it managed to annihilate Pico's wine industry?

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[01:05:58] DiEM's commitment at diem-closures.com forward slash I D T T that's D I A M dash closures with an S dot com forward slash I D T T for more information. So why did Pico's thriving wine industry

[01:06:18] go offline in the 1850s? And also why was it such a big deal? Like just how popular was Pico wine before the 1850s? Well for at least two centuries, Pico Island wine was drunk throughout

[01:06:32] the world. In the second half of the 1680s, ship merchants supplied alcohol including Pico wine to fishermen in Newfoundland and Maine and ship merchants used it as a subtle means of workforce control. Wine samples were used to sign up crews and wine was available for purchase

[01:06:50] with credit but when payday came around it barely covered the wine consumed and this kept the fishermen who couldn't resist in debt to the merchants. In the same decade, the wine appears

[01:07:03] in New York tax codes where it was listed with sweet wines and it was taxed about the same per gallon as all wine and spirits. But a hundred years later things seem to have shifted and in 1789

[01:07:17] we see an early mention of this wine in a price list in the Philadelphia Gazette and it appears to be a dry white wine. In the Gazette, it's one of just five kinds of wines available and it was

[01:07:28] the least expensive of the five options. About 30 years later in the 1820s, we start to see dozens and dozens and dozens of mentions of Pico wine for sale in many newspapers throughout the US east

[01:07:41] coast. It even shows up for sale in Australia and in 1843 a Massachusetts paper reported most of the wine exported from the Azores is raised from these volcano vineyards of Pico. But not only was Pico wine exported around the world, it frequently masqueraded as other wine regions as well.

[01:08:00] First we got to unpack the truly beguiling relationship with the neighboring island of Fayao. Though the main lava formations came up at different times, Pico and Fayao share the same volcanic base underneath the ocean. Like a stem from the leak in the faults below and underneath

[01:08:16] the ocean, these two islands are separated by a deep channel. Pico did come up much later than Fayao though, only about 300,000 years ago. Fayao is about three times as old and it's complicated because each island has had several new lava flows since they originally emerged.

[01:08:35] So the soils have super different ages and very different fertilities, which informs their capacities for what crops they can produce. But because they're so close, some old sources call them sister islands, twin islands, and ship captains have written about how they recognize

[01:08:49] their twin silhouettes when they sail near. I read the account of one sailing commander who was adrift at sea for about a month, but as their provisions were running dangerously low, he

[01:08:59] reported, I saw land on the port bow. I recognized Fayao to port and Pico to starboard. And his was not the only account of distressed ships in the Atlantic who found refuge at Fayao's Horta port.

[01:09:12] The twin island silhouettes must have been a really happy sight for ship weary eyes. Because of Fayao's famous international port and Pico's limited soils and the historic economic disparity that led from those circumstances, there's a bit of juicy tension between the

[01:09:29] islands. And I mean like Fayao are the Yankees and Pico are the Mets and it goes deep. So when you're on Pico, when you're in Met Stadium, you don't go talking about the Yankees. Pico and Fayao historically had intertwined economies. Fayao sent cereals to Pico and

[01:09:47] Pico sent wines and beef to Fayao. Pico has long been famous for both wine and cattle. The cattle graze inland and they make the most delicious butter. The Pico cattle are also famous for their beef and for all the meat eaters out there,

[01:10:00] the beef is so silky it almost looks like tuna. And the cheese made from the milk from these cows is astonishing. It was like some of the most interesting and unique cheese I've ever eaten.

[01:10:09] Like imagine if butter could have the texture of a marshmallow, kind of spongy and then the kind of spongy and be like a little bit tangy like yogurt. That's what the Pico cheese is like.

[01:10:20] It was almost like if cheese could be candy, it was like addictive and I'm still dreaming about it. So Pico and Fayao traded with each other by smaller ships and many of Pico's products left for international ports through Fayao. Because of this, you usually see Pico wine

[01:10:39] show up as Fayao wine from the 1600s through the early 1800s. But starting in the early 1800s, we see crossover mentions like Pico-Fayao wine as a combo concept. And then in the 1820s,

[01:10:52] we really start to see the actual word Pico more and more on registers. And Pico almost became its own brand even though it was still also called Fayao in many other places. In addition to the Fayao confusion, Pico wine often masqueraded as other kinds of wine.

[01:11:13] In 1839, Pular mentioned that Pico wine was often sold falsely as sherry. And in the 1840s, we see wine being sold as Pico Madero wine. And who knows what that could have been.

[01:11:23] And I also came across an 1867 recipe for port and one of the ingredients was 544 gallons of Fayao wine. What does it all mean? The main point I'm trying to make is that Pico Island pumped out

[01:11:38] some serious wine and it was consumed all around the Atlantic Rim and beyond by the name of Pico or Fayao. And sometimes it was even sold falsely as other wines. We also need to talk about whales,

[01:11:54] and I don't mean burgundy collectors. I'm talking about the huge swimming mammal kind of whale, the kind that feeds and breeds around the Azores. For hundreds of years, whales have been important to the economy of the Azores and the whale and wine economies have often intertwined with one

[01:12:14] another. You see, in the 17 and 1800s, whale oil was a major source of fuel, a precious commodity. And it's really difficult for us to fully appreciate the impact that whales had at that

[01:12:27] time because we don't really use whale products today. But to the people of the 1800s, whale oil burned for a long time. It was odorless. It had a high smoke point. And it was highly prized as

[01:12:38] a machine lubricant during the Industrial Revolution because it didn't make smoke or smells. And to really fathom Azores whaling and how it intertwined in the wine industry, you kind of have to see it in the larger context of the global whaling industry.

[01:12:53] Azores whaling was deeply connected to New England whaling. And New England whalers hunted a kind of whale called right whales for oil off the coast of Nantucket and beyond. The New England whalers targeted right whales because they had large amounts of oil and they were easier to hunt

[01:13:07] because they stayed at the surface longer than a typical whale while feeding and they stayed close to the shore. Their high blubber content made them float when they were killed so they were easier to process. And because they were so targeted, today right whales are one of the

[01:13:21] most endangered species of whales in the world. The New England whalers overhunted right whales and the decline was noticeable as early as the 1720s. The whaling companies of New England looked

[01:13:33] to the Azores for sperm whales. Sperm whales also breathed at the surface for a long time and each whale yielded about one ton of oil. In the early 1800s you start to see references of whaling

[01:13:45] crews that are made up of both New Englanders and Azorians. And highlighting this connection, the Russell Purrington artist duo painted a famous whaling panorama in 1848. It's beautiful. And one panel shows New England whaling ships picking up supplies and recruiting crewmen

[01:14:01] in the Azores. This painting shows a beautiful rendition of Fayol and Pico side by side with sailing ships going between them. The sperm whale economy grew. Candles made from sperm whale tallow, they lasted longer than a typical candle. And these candles were in high demand for lighthouses

[01:14:20] on both coasts of the Atlantic. This is back when lighthouses were a huge thing. Also prized was a substance called ambergris. It's sort of like a waxy whale colon ooze literally found in the intestines.

[01:14:33] Even though it comes out sort of like fecal matter, it's not fecal matter and it has this amazing aroma that was used in perfumes. It also had a value similar to gold. And sometimes

[01:14:43] ambergris was even used to flavor drinks like wine, bringing the two industries together in a unique way. Whale bone and also baleen were in high demand in the 1800s for women's fashion. Hoop skirts kept

[01:14:55] their shape with baleen and corsets were sculpted with whale bone structure. There were so many industries that spun off of these whale products. But soon the sperm whales in the Atlantic were

[01:15:05] over hunted as well. And the New England whaling companies, they moved on to the South Pacific in the early 1800s. They were chasing after another colony of sperm whales that live and hunt in the

[01:15:14] South Pacific. I found one 1843 article about a whaling shipwreck in the Pacific that listed the surviving crew members and their origins. Most were from New England, but there were three crew from the Azores, including two from Pico Island. This is evidence of a larger trend of Atlantic

[01:15:31] whalers looking to the South Pacific in the early to mid 1800s. This delivered a blow to Azorian and New England economies as the whalers moved on to another ocean. Crewmen could still join the

[01:15:42] whalers, but they'd have to head to the Pacific and leave home for many years working in these sort of brutal ocean conditions. And around this time is the same time when it happened. When Oedium struck Pico, Pico Island vineyards were wiped out from powdery mildew, also called

[01:15:59] Oedium. It's a type of fungus that looks like a plant is covered in handfuls and handfuls of cigar ash. Oedium destroyed the vineyards on Pico, and in 1850 the Pico wine blight was reported around the world. On the infertile soils, Pico Island could produce few other crops outside of

[01:16:20] wine, especially near the coast. This really hurt the local economy and a huge population exodus occurred in the following years as people sought opportunity elsewhere. Those who stayed pieced together a new economy based on whaling the remaining sperm whales who still fed and bred

[01:16:36] around the Azores. And at first Pico whaling was semi-successful. There were still some sperm whales in the area and sperm whale oil was still a hot commodity. But, and this almost seems completely unrelated, in Pennsylvania someone struck fossil fuel oil in 1859. And by 1865 the economy in the

[01:16:57] U.S. had transitioned almost completely to fossil fuels, tanking the demand for sperm whale oil. People switched to kerosene lamps because kerosene was cheaper and easier to get in the U.S. Then in the 1880s we all know what happened. Nikolai Tesla and Thomas Edison did the whole

[01:17:15] electricity thing and soon after electricity became a mainstream utility. Whale tallow candles became obsolete. So Pico's experiencing decades of continual population loss due to oidium, a volatile whale oil market, and then they suffered a second great blight of phylloxera.

[01:17:35] And this was sort of a triple whammy to Pico's economy. Boom, boom, boom. There was no longer any incentive to put work into the vineyards so people stopped farming them. Some vineyards were abandoned by people who emigrated and there is a lack of property

[01:17:51] ownership records. So even today there are forested vineyards all around the island but nobody knows to whom they belong. It's tricky because you can't go in and farm someone else's land but it's also tough because as long as they stay forested the birds come and they eat

[01:18:07] your grapes next door. I heard several winemakers express their frustration at this whole issue with the birds in the unknown land. In the late 1800s those who stayed on Pico kept just enough vineyards viable to farm personal wine and they planted hybrids also known as multivitous grape

[01:18:27] varieties to protect their crop from phylloxera. Whaling continued but it was a struggle. The whale products were less and less in demand. Whale fuel was replaced by fossil fuel and electricity, corsets went out of fashion as Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge championed the smock dress

[01:18:44] as sort of a 1900s women's fashion liberation movement, and then during World War I demand for whale oil rose again because it worked well as a smoke and odor-free lubricant for submarine machinery. By one account 58,000 whales were killed during World War I so Britain and allies

[01:19:04] could have the oil to fuel their war effort. And the Azores found themselves in the crosshairs of a strategic Atlantic location during both World War I and World War II. In fact the U.S. naval base

[01:19:16] in the Azores likely swayed Salazar, the prime minister of Portugal at that time, closer to the allies during World War II. Afterward Portugal joined the Marshall Plan and was a founding member

[01:19:25] of NATO. But it didn't get easy when the wars ended. Soon after the wars disruption and tragedy struck again. For about a year from fall 1957 to fall 1958, a series of earthquakes and eruptions

[01:19:39] rocked the central islands. Fajal had a major eruption to the point where the U.S. enacted the Azorian Refugee Act welcoming thousands of Azorians to the New England area. And whaling continued on

[01:19:52] Pico though far from its glory days until the 1980s when it was banned. The last Azores whale was killed in the mid-1980s. And in 1987 this interesting man Serge Villal co-founded a whale watching business in the Azores. And these sperm whales are so interesting. They have the largest

[01:20:09] brains of any creature on earth. They hunt using echolocation clicks similar to bats by snapping a muscle in their nose. And each geographic family of sperm whales has their own unique songs and click

[01:20:20] rhythms. The echolocation clicks they use are so forceful that it can feel to squid prey that they are being struck. The clicks weaken their prey and then the whales speed up to 30 clicks a second

[01:20:31] right before striking. The sperm whales can go to depths of 1600 meters and they can stay underwater for an hour. They dive deep to hunt these squid. And biologists suspect they may be threatened by

[01:20:42] sonar and underwater sonic canyons that are used to locate fossil fuel oil in the ocean. Serge was like a conservationist. He was instrumental in taking the existing whaling infrastructure and transforming it into a whale watching and ecotourism industry. And it was an incredibly

[01:21:00] successful economic parlay. The whale watching towers are still there but today the conservationists watch for whales and let whale watching boats know where to go to see them. And the whale processing

[01:21:11] facility is still there but today it's a museum. Whale watching is the new engine of the Pico economy bringing in millions a year in tourism. The winemakers I spoke with on Pico are part of

[01:21:23] this generation that witnessed the last gasp of the whaling industry. Many are too young to have actually participated in it but it was deeply a part of their parents and grandparents lives.

[01:21:32] And I got a sense that the island community is eager to move into this new phase where the Pico wine revival moves in parallel with the whale tourism industry. And the people who visit for

[01:21:43] whale watching can also visit the Adegas, try the wine. The industries can co-support each other. And I also sensed equally from the community this slight apprehension that if tourism increases too much something really special could be lost. And whales reverberate throughout Pico culture,

[01:22:03] the folklore, the fairy tales, even the music. So let's head over to another Adega, the Cazar Adega where Fortunato Garcia makes some very unique wines. And for English speakers Cazar is

[01:22:16] spelled C-Z-A-R and it means czar. Just here the C is pronounced on its own where it isn't in English. Fortunato took over the Cazar Adega from his late father and when I visited Fortunato sang this

[01:22:28] beautiful song that his father had written about whales. You'll hear the call balaya balaya, the Portuguese word for whale. When Fortunato's dad made wine at the Adega, his goal was to preserve the Pasado wine tradition on the island

[01:23:13] as the Pico economy was at the tail end of their whaling industry. Today Fortunato has taken the Pasado focused Adega to the international market. And you might be wondering, wait a minute what is Pasado again? Pico is historically famous for this Apacemento

[01:23:28] style wine made from dried or late harvest grapes and here the style is called Pasado. It's similar to Pesito. Pasado means outer raisins and that's how this particular wine is made. A priest, Padre António Cordeiro from 1717, that he writes that Pico Pasado wine it's comparable to

[01:23:45] the Malvasia from Adega but only better than this one. When we became world patrimony in 2004 the Vatican sent us a wine list from the banquet from the grand maestro of the Maltese chevaliers and this is dated from 1797 which appears on the wine list from all over the world

[01:24:03] appears two Pico wines, Pico Seco which is Pico dry and Pico Amoroso. This is a really Portuguese name it's like calling a sweetheart wine. Amoroso it's nothing but the Pasado wine again.

[01:24:17] At this time we are exporting all over the world. We're exporting the Pasado wine for the popes, the emperors, the kings and definitely to the czars and we do have registers of the czars being

[01:24:31] the biggest importer of Pasado Pico wine and talking about the biggest it's like three times more than anybody else's. And actually in second place well for 20 years of exportation let me put the numbers down we exported about 24 million liters of wine although it's most common wine

[01:24:50] and that's what it's called at the time and understanding already at the time there was only four places in the island that were registered as being able to produce Pasado wine. The rest of the

[01:25:00] island would produce common wine which 60 percent would be bought by the British. Of course I was digging in all of this to find Pasado wine because of my czar and what I found is of these 24 million

[01:25:12] liters only 33,000 were Pasado wines. Understanding already back then it was a very hard wine to make. And just to contextualize those numbers about 200 years ago less than one percent of exports were Pasado. It was an elite wine that sold for high prices. If you think about today Bordeaux

[01:25:30] usually makes less than one percent of Sauternes and today Germany produces far less than one percent of Birnhauslesin and Trockenbirnhauslesin combined. Those aren't quite apples to apples analogies but you get the idea. So the export volume of Pasado wine from Pico it kind of makes sense and this

[01:25:48] means that much of the time when you see Pico or Fajal wine in historic records especially at lower prices it's likely referencing a drier table wine. Out of these 33,000 liters 24,000 went to the port

[01:26:01] of St. Pittsburgh. In second place appears U.S. It doesn't say the port though it can only be the big metropolis Boston or New York at that time in my opinion but appears about 6,000 liters bought

[01:26:12] by U.S. And that's pretty much like a very short version of our traditional history of our Pasado wine which was appearing everywhere in the world and of course with the big plagues coming down in 1850, 1872 with the filoxera practically everything disappeared. So only one place in

[01:26:32] the island replanted our typical grapes which was Criação Velha and that's the only place I own vineyards because that's the only place in the island that has very old vineyards from our

[01:26:45] traditional typical grapes. That part of the island at the time was selling by the liter and we're talking about 40s and 50s now in the 20th century already and so understanding that selling by the

[01:26:59] liter Verdelho is not the best grape is a Rintos do Sojo because it's way more productible and it's way more resistant and so the owner of our first vineyard that sold that to my dad at the beginning

[01:27:12] of the 60s he sold the vineyard to my dad for five euros which is at that time was money but still it was an incredible deal with this promise that he had to continue to produce this wine

[01:27:25] because this wine was about to disappear. Filoxera didn't kill the wine people were doing it by selling it by the liter and so that's what my dad did of course with an incredible low productions but

[01:27:37] still stubborn as hell he kept doing this and I'm glad he did and that's why my labels have Cazar from José Eduardo Garcia my dad's name it's my tribute to him because if it wasn't for him we would not

[01:27:49] be drinking this nowadays. There are many interesting things about the Cazar wines but one thing that stood out to me was the lack of perceptible volatile acidity and scientifically it was there

[01:28:01] but it was so integrated that I couldn't really smell it. Now I must admit to you all that I have a small obsession with Pacito, Apacimento, TBA style wines. I collect them, I feature them, I seek them

[01:28:12] out in every wine region, I spend way too much money on them and I think they're really special. Feeding my obsession I even made my own one year as an exercise to try and understand it a bit more.

[01:28:23] So I came to taste at Fortunato Zadega as kind of a bonafide Pacito wine nerd. Now so often with dried grape wines or really late harvest wines where the grapes have started

[01:28:40] to wrinkle there is volatile acidity on the nose and often I still enjoy the wines VA almost comes with the territory of raisin ferments but to me the best Apacimento wines are the ones where you

[01:28:52] can't really smell that VA and that has occurred so rarely. I can really remember the lack of present VA on just a handful of examples like Rocco de Montegrosi's Vincanto, Gavala Vincanto and some of the Ben Rye vintages from Pantelleria and with those rare exceptions most Pacito has

[01:29:09] this sort of haze or veil of VA that you need to cut through mentally or adjust to before you can really get to the flavor and often Botrytis seems to clear a lot of that up but in non-Botrytis

[01:29:20] raisin wines the VA is definitely a thing and I was kind of blown away because the Cazar wines were one of those examples where the VA is so integrated that on the perception you can't really

[01:29:30] tell it's there. And another thing about the wines and again I kept coming across this on Pico over and over the texture was so unique it had all those flavor elements of Pacito wines like almonds, nuts

[01:29:42] aran dry and raisin candied citrus candied melon layers and layers of persimmon apricots but the texture was more lifted and Venice very unlike a typical Pacito which can present thick more like syrup or honey. Fortunato explains that this is because the ambient yeasts from the extreme

[01:29:58] environment can reach higher alcohol levels in fact he reaches about 20 percent without fortification. I do believe it's our yeasts, our indigenous yeasts. These are the ones that are totally nuts just like the climber and just probably like our grapes so again everything is

[01:30:16] good together. It makes sense that an extreme climate would have extreme yeasts because I can't imagine a delicate yeast lasting from year to year. Yeah exactly. So far we've examined Pico's modern wine story, a 10-year story but as with many things on Pico

[01:30:37] the story is not that simple. Before the whale watching transition when Pico was sort of struggling in the late 1940s adjusting to this post-war era when whale oil was no longer needed there was one institution that made a huge impact and there's definitely a decade-long

[01:30:52] renaissance underway and there is a second generation of this renaissance taking things into the 2022s but there's also the co-op. The Pico co-op founded in 1949 it helped bridge a gap between Pico's 1800s wine history and today's breakout period. In a similar way that Cazara

[01:31:11] Dega carried the Passato torch through this same period. These valuable links between past and future preserved and recast institutional knowledge and vineyard know-how to be reworked later by others and even by the co-op itself. Like Escoffier with the mother sauces, like Kulhark

[01:31:29] queuing up the brakes, like Cezanne bridging realism and modernism these links between eras can be incredibly transformative. I chatted with the Pico co-op winemaker Bernardo Cabral over Zoom to get his take. Echoing what Andre, Ricardo, Antonio and Fortunato all mentioned he described

[01:31:48] the high level viticulture that happens on Pico. Well you have to understand a little bit of the viticulture in Pico it's a very small size vineyard each person has this per cell of vineyard

[01:32:01] it is small because you're not allowed it you can't mechanize it you can't use tractors and everything everything is made by hand and the capacity of reaction is very important so in a

[01:32:16] morning if the wind is changing of direction if there's a storm suddenly coming you need to react okay so it happens a lot of times that I'm with someone and that person says sorry I have to go

[01:32:31] because the wind change and I have to do something in my vineyard so the wind the wind is very important is responsible to give us the wind is giving us the the grapes because if we wouldn't

[01:32:42] have the wind they wouldn't dry we wouldn't dry the grapes after the raining which almost every day it rains we couldn't have grapes so the wind is very important and then another thing is how you

[01:32:53] manage so you put you elevate it with stones you elevated the bunches and the other thing is how do we manage the leaves they are on the top and so you have a different approaches my favorite one

[01:33:07] is the one that you call it like it's an umbrella so they they take the leaves but they leave they leave one leaf on the top of a bunch and it works as a as an umbrella so it when it rains comes

[01:33:20] it just goes it doesn't go directly to the bunch well of course there's always some but it falls to the to the other side this is this is a I see how precise they do this and only some

[01:33:34] families they do they they use this technique and normally these guys they have the best grades so they're right they open in the middle but they leave that and others they don't understand this

[01:33:45] they open totally and sometimes what happened when you open totally you have more birds to they eat the grapes then they have botrysis because the birds are hitting the the berries

[01:33:56] and uh and then you have sometimes you can have a the sun or you can have you know anything that can damage the the the grapes yeah it's a lot of things

[01:34:13] I almost think of Philip Glass when I think of hundreds of people farming tiny home plots and making leaf umbrellas for each grape bunch and listen to what else they do. The wind itself what they do when the wind changes when they have these dramatic speedy winds coming

[01:34:28] they break the end of the the shoot a shoot with bunches near the the main bone and you have long shoots and at the end they cut it because this part doesn't gives you fruit so they cut it

[01:34:42] and they they put a stone on the top of it so in order in order to get the shoot stuck instead of going with the wind because if it goes with winds it can break near the main bone and then you lose

[01:34:57] the grapes and you lose a very important shoot. It's really impressive it's really you can't believe this is true but then you go there and you realize it's true. Could you imagine weighing down the many arms of each grapevine with rocks

[01:35:17] to keep each shoot from whipping around in the wind? How long do you think it would take you to prep a Pico Island vineyard for high winds by attending to each shoot? Any guesses on how long

[01:35:31] it takes? Well in much less time than whatever that amount of time is I'll be right back because I promised you soup and the soup is coming after this break. It's not enough to make great wine you also have to reach the consumer that appreciates

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[01:36:52] needs of your wine brand. Our soup has been simmering this whole time. The soup tradition on Pico is called sopa do espirito santo or holy spirit soup and if it sounds religious it's because

[01:37:07] it is. This tradition started during a volcanic eruption. Hundreds of years ago people didn't know what was going on. They saw the lava and were like what is this mystery? And everyone agreed that if

[01:37:18] the holy spirit would save them from the mystery they would commemorate the occasion by feeding the poor and the holy spirit soup was born. Monica elaborates on these beginnings. It was a kind of

[01:37:30] mystery because people were coming from parts of Europe that there was no volcanoes and when people came here they start seeing natural phenomena they couldn't explain. They didn't know what it was so for them that was a mystery. So that's why they called with this historical eruptions

[01:37:56] we call it historical because there were people living here when it happened. So they call it mystery. It was also a mystery from God. Why was that happening? Why? And then mystery of seeing plants growing on the rocks. It was also a mystery. The word mystery associated

[01:38:15] with this type of situation means all of this. And this eruption started and then people start claiming to God, to the holy spirit to stop this and it stopped and in the next day it blows here

[01:38:32] again. So it was like oh and they came again with the holy spirit stop stop so that's why on the 21st of September they have to accomplish a promise every year because well people say in the historical

[01:38:52] records is that they were coming with the crown of the holy spirit claiming for the volcano to stop and so the volcano stopped and there was someone that said as long as the world is world we will

[01:39:07] come here every year on the 21st of September and we'll distribute bread to everybody. Over time the holy spirit soup has evolved into something similar to thanksgiving. Communities can gather anytime they choose and sometimes groups or brotherhoods collaborate for

[01:39:34] special holy spirit soup get-togethers. There are three basic ingredients bread, meat and broth but the specifics really vary from area to area. Felipe Roca from the Azores Wine Company is from Sao Miguel Island and he's also a hospitality leader in the Azores. In working with chefs from

[01:39:53] around all the islands he's kind of an expert on cuisine variants from place to place. Let's hear what he has to say about the soup. I would say you have two different approaches one is the holy

[01:40:05] ghost soups they have meat and usually they have cow but they also have pork depends they have a lot of bread also and you have like a broth with some some some aromatic herbs and then you use

[01:40:23] depending on the different places where you are. You have other dishes for example that I think they have a lot of history inside which is alcatra from Terceira Island. The alcatra has a lot of

[01:40:36] spices and that spices were used specifically there in Terceira because Angra was a very important port where the boats that came from India used to stop so that's why they they use spices that

[01:40:49] were probably not available on other islands and that dish with the cow meat is very typical from that island and even within the island you have different recipes in some parts they use white

[01:41:03] wine and some other they use fortified wine and another ones they use hybrids so it depends on the on the zones they they cook differently that that dish. But these soups are also important for a

[01:41:15] wine reason they are always consumed with vino de shiro or aromatic wine. To give you an idea of the importance of this genre of wine on my way home a bunch of people on the plane to Boston had

[01:41:28] family-made bottles of vino de shiro in their checked luggage and in the customs line one woman told me how it was the last wine her late brother-in-law had made and she was bringing home

[01:41:38] just three bottles to remind her of her family in the Azores. Vino de shiro is a homemade wine and each region like the soup may have a different wine but most people make their vino de shiro from

[01:41:50] multi-vitas grape varieties or hybrids and a main variety that you see frequently on Pico is Isabella. Isabella is a wine of the people and it was a crop that Pico could depend on through the

[01:42:03] traumas of the last century in kind of a tone-deaf move the government prohibited Isabella like imagine if the U.S. federal government outlawed something as central to American life as like growing your own tomatoes and that's how it played. Millions of people would sort of be like

[01:42:20] no we're going to continue to grow our own tomatoes and in the Azores they shall continue to grow their own Isabella. You might also be thinking so it seems like y'all pieced together a history of

[01:42:36] this episode with newspaper clippings export records and some old menus well you would be right. Fayol and Pico do not have a ton of readily available records one of the reasons for this was

[01:42:48] a social uprising that the islanders referred to as the year of the noise during this year and despite a ton of digging I could not pinpoint the exact year please leave it in the comments if

[01:42:59] you know several community-set protest fires destroyed a lot of the existing records. We have here a big difficulty of having documentation because Pico was always a place where we well it was very difficult to live here and instructed people never stayed here I'll say many people

[01:43:22] didn't know how to read and to write and we have lack of documentation and worse than that some centuries ago there was like a local revolution and the locals burned a lot of

[01:43:36] books and records and it failed and also here okay in Lages also. So the history of Pico is pieced together with tiny puzzle pieces little glimpses of clues and evidence left on various

[01:43:50] continents and if you have any clues please let us know in the comments so we can continue to discover more. There's also a tradition in the Azores of making fortified wines from all sorts

[01:44:02] of fruits including grapes. A type of fortified wine called licoroso has aging minimums and a minimum alcohol requirement of 16 percent. Some achieve 16 or higher naturally and some fortify to reach 16 percent. Some are dry and some are sweeter there's a broad spectrum of possibilities

[01:44:20] in this category. Some of them tend to taste more like a typical pesito wine like the Quesar Pasado we explored earlier and some of the fortified wines with heavy oak aging have vibes

[01:44:29] that remind you more of a whiskey or an XO brandy. And there isn't a ton of backstock on Pico to explore the history of this traditional style though some producers are starting to have 10

[01:44:39] year versions or more and it seems to be a point of real excitement for everybody. I spoke with Cristina Cunha from Carcarita where her uncle Leonardo Da Silva makes licoroso. We tried their Barraca 10 and it definitely had these whiskey vibes.

[01:44:55] And so to certify the wines for instance this licoroso wine we have to age it for three years but we've been doing batches with five and eight and now we did this one with ten and that's the

[01:45:08] idea to try to keep it longer and longer to try to understand how the wine can actually develop. This is like we said already it's the batch from 2008. We actually let it in the oak barrels for

[01:45:22] 10 years. Leonardo also has an extensive licoroso stock at the co-op and he even mentioned that sometimes he ferments Tarantegio do Pico in old licoroso barrels. Don't you just want to try that? But before I left Cristina I couldn't resist asking her about the Muda. Yes that's one of

[01:45:42] the interesting things. You can have your first house like in the main road and about two three kilometers down you have this the cottage house, the summer house or what we call a Dega and people

[01:45:53] actually move from one house to the other. Yeah that's it's basically just to spend the summer the summer months usually during April, March, April. It also has a little bit to do with the

[01:46:07] wine history because people would do that when they had to start doing the maintenance to the vineyards. They would move to some of those houses and they would handle all the maintenance to the vineyards and then they would stay for until the harvesting. So that's why usually

[01:46:23] you move back to your first house when the harvesting ends because it's end of season it's when the weather changes of course the hour changes the days becomes shorter and

[01:46:36] and the sea like you can see changes a lot too so then it's time to move back but moving back it's like maybe two three kilometers back. It was funny because some people I asked had no idea what

[01:46:48] the Muda was and I think that's because some areas don't have that tradition because they live pretty close to their Adegas but also the roads are much better these days and it doesn't seem to be as

[01:46:57] difficult as it might have once been to make daily trips to the vineyards during harvest season So it seems kind of like an old-fashioned thing and the nice roads are a new thing that has helped

[01:47:07] to link up the different parts of the island and to create a larger sense of a Pico community identity. In the near recent past communities were isolated from one another by the terrain and the easiest way to travel around was actually by boat. Monica illustrates this

[01:47:22] point with a story about her mom. My mother was born 74 years ago and she was my grandmother who was here having problems for the birth of my mother so they called a doctor from Soho that

[01:47:37] was the main town and the doctor came by boat to come quicker. I also caught up with Marco Ferria from Corral Atlantis. A handful of commercial producers make their wines in the Atlantis winery facility. Marco is from Maddalena on Pico and he had thoughts on Pico's unique products.

[01:47:56] He by the way is a fellow Pico cheese lover. Pico it's one highland we have nine highlands it's some it's nine rocks in the middle of the Atlantic so you you have to have to make a different thing

[01:48:12] Nine rocks in the ocean a great description of the Azores island group. Well on at least one of these rocks some very intriguing wines are being made. And that brings us to the end

[01:48:25] of our journey on Pico island. As always thanks for listening. If you get to Pico don't forget to wear your big boots under your tramping trousers and unless otherwise noted these interviews occurred in late 2021 and they captured the late 2021 story of Pico. Now I observed a very

[01:48:44] dynamic scene on Pico and from what I saw there will probably be a lot of change and many more players in the coming years. I hope you learned something today about this fascinating island

[01:48:54] in the Atlantic especially you Weedram. And most of all a special thanks to all the people who shared their stories. In order of appearance we met Vanda Supa the director of environmental and climate change at Pico, Monica Silva-Goulart she's an architectural expert of the Pico island vineyards

[01:49:09] Paolo Machado at Insula and Azores Wine Company, Dr. Joy Ting the analogist at the winemakers research exchange. All their experiment results are posted online at winemakersresearchexchange.com it's an incredible resource. We also heard from Antonio Mazzanita at Azores Wine Company.

[01:49:27] Antonio also provided a ton of historic and scientific context and he pointed me to quite a few sources and also did a bunch of translation along the way so an extra thank you to you Antonio.

[01:49:38] We also heard from Katia Laranjo from her new wine label Aetnum, Andre Ribeiro and Ricardo Pinto of Entre Pedras, you guys rock, Jose Eduardo and Luisa Terra at Pocino Bay, Bernardo Cabral the Pico co-op winemaker, Fortunato Garcia at Cazar, Tito Silva at Cerca dos Frades translated by

[01:49:55] Fortunato Garcia, Lucas Lopez Amaral translated by Paolo Machado and Felipe Roca from the Azores Wine Company. Felipe is an all-around hospitality leader in the Azores and he was instrumental in connecting me with many of the voices in this episode so a double thanks to you Felipe. We also

[01:50:11] heard from Cristina Cunha from Cargarita and Marco Feria of Corral Atlantis. Obrigada! All Drink to That is hosted and produced by myself, Levi Dalton. Aaron Scala has contributed original pieces. Editorial assistance has been provided by Bill Kimsey. The show music was

[01:50:42] performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett. Show artwork by Alicia Tanoian. T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs and so much more including show stickers, notebooks and even gift wrap are available for sale if you check the show website alldrinktothatpod.com that's I-L-L

[01:50:59] drink to that P-O-D dot com which is the same place you'd go to sign up for our email list or to make one of the crucially important donations that help keep this show operating. You can donate

[01:51:11] from anywhere using PayPal or Stripe on the show website. Remember to hit subscribe or to follow this show in your favorite podcast app please that's super important to see every episode and thank you for listening. Today we've been speaking about vineyards in lava and I want to

[01:51:44] take a moment here to note the passing of Andrea Franchetti, the owner of a pioneering winery on another volcano, Mount Etna. Levi interviewed Andrea Franchetti back in 2014 for episode 186 of this program. In this excerpt from their conversation, Andrea spoke about searching out

[01:52:03] new regions and what that means for winemaking. I mean what is a very good wine? A very good wine to a winemaker it's easy to understand what what it is if you take someone who's grown up in a

[01:52:19] classic winemaking place where there's been a bettering of all procedures that goes in a certain direction that has been that direction has been taking place for the last five centuries like in Burgundy say made in that particular climate with that particular wine coming out of it

[01:52:44] and that guides you but if you're in a completely brand new place where wine has never been made before what are the what are the criterias that should guide you for direction in your winemaking

[01:53:00] I have never made wine in classic places I have always been going to new places in places where they had never been planted with and made before so you develop a different talent which is through exercise you can learn everything including this including following the vision

[01:53:22] that a certain place suggests to you and and you are suggested a vision by the light and the nights and the days of a place and staying there it grows on you and all the lights of the sun and

[01:53:38] the temperatures of the winds and the humidity or the dryness of the air coming into your mind and become something invisible which is locked in the secret area of your mind and and that

[01:53:55] is something that has an effect so that you keep it in mind and it has to be translated in a code sort of and that code is the way you make your wine. Andrea Franchetti passed away

[01:54:13] in the early days of December 2021. He was the owner of Passo Pisciaro on Mount Etna and Tenuta di Trinoro in Tuscany. May he rest in peace.