La Florens is one of those wines that hide a story worth telling. In his case, overcoming, love for the people and a mother are the protagonists. In fact, its label, with beautiful calligraphy and a little bird stamped, are the clues we need.
IT ALL STARTED IN CALAF
Florentina lived in a modest house in Calaf, a small town in the Catalan region of Anoia . She enjoyed a quiet life, she had a formal boyfriend and plans to get married.
She had grown up there, in an environment that, to anyone's eyes, seemed safe and peaceful. But Florentyna was , from the first minutes of her life, a survivor, almost an exception.
His mother she brought her into the world before her time , when she weighed just over a kilo, and she died shortly after Florentina was born. She was a frail-looking baby, with a life line that could be broken at any moment and he had already lost one of the most important pillars of her existence.
His father , who was deeply in love with his wife, sank into sadness . He was a widower, with a baby as fragile as his married life, which was disappearing at that time, and he had to get little Florentina, and himself, forward.
But the little girl was strong, very strong.
Old photo of the town.
With the help of a wet nurse, the girl she was becoming a strong young woman that she was getting older and she helped in farmhouse traditional Catalan where she lived, a place where she always saw plates of abundant, if modest, food on the table. She had to replenish the strength of the workers who worked and helped in the tasks of the farm.
LIFE OF CHANGES
The war came into her life when she was very young, and she was unable to go to school. Florentine she barely knew how to add, subtract and write. When she did, she made a lot of misspellings; however, her handwriting was refined, elegant; her calligraphy was calmly beautiful , delicate, with that hint of fragility that she knew so well from the first minutes of her life.
Florentyna married a man from a nearby town whose way of life was make and fix wool mattresses . He dedicated himself to unstitching, removing the wool, carding it to fluff it up, beating it with a hazelnut stick and refilling the mattress, which recovered its spongy and fluffy texture and could last another year or two in perfect condition. After that time, start over.
The arrival of new technologies in this matter of sleeping made the work of the mattress maker unnecessary and Florentina and her husband had to make the hard decision of anger Barcelona to live to carve out a good future.
She, of course, did not take it well. She knew that she was going to miss everything that she had grown up with. : Calaf, the sheep, the tables full of people who came from the fields to eat, the landscape, the song of the birds...
country love.
AN “IMMORTAL” GOLDFISH
Resigned, but with character, Florentina put a condition to her husband to leave the town: “ I will have a bird in Barcelona to hear him sing and keep me company, ”she told him. He, surprised but compassionate, accepted, although he also put her condition: “ Ok, Florentyna, but when the bird dies, there will be no more”.
And said and done; they left for the city and Florentina still missed her house, but she had the consolation of listening to her goldfinch sing about her. He accompanied her for 53 years…
Taking into account that the life of these birds does not usually exceed, with luck, 12 years, that was a true miracle. Or maybe it wasn't... Because she Florentina managed during all that time to replace your birdie her when she died, and she was always able to keep one in the cage without her husband noticing her.
Little was…
AND JOSEP ARRIVED
Florentina raised her children in the city, although every weekend she cured her homesickness by going back to town.
The little one, Josep, still remembers those days that they spent away from that urban frenzy that made Florentina so uncomfortable, La Florens, as Josep liked to call her.
The boy became a man and forged a promising career linked to life in Barcelona, but he did not forget those afternoons of ball and sandwich in Calaf.
Josep Grau's vineyard.
The nostalgia that flooded her mother when she had to move to the city also reached Josep, who came to miss the countryside, although instead of grazing or life in the farmhouse, she decided to cultivate the vineyard and chose Capçanes , a small town in Montsant, to learn to be a winegrower.
Over the years, the hobby became a growing passion and the dream of Joseph Grau It was taking liquid form. He began to dream of wines in which he tirelessly searches for the finesse that combines with the character of the land where they are born.
when joseph he came across a plot of old grenache , surviving despite the difficulties of the climate, the years and the rural abandonment, it was said that he would make a wine with his grapes capable of reflecting that finesse that, until then, he had tirelessly pursued. And he got to work.
When tasting it, he found a red wine that exhibited that strong character, that attachment to the territory and that delicate elegance that, unmistakably, reminded him of his mother.
That wine could only have one name: La Florens , the fruit of love for the land, for rural life and the landscape that he had learned from the woman who gave him life.
A label full of meaning.
On the label of La Florens you can see a little bird , which recalls that immortal goldfinch that accompanied Florentina for so many years and it was his connection to the town.
and the name is written with a beautiful calligraphy , careful, meticulous: it is the handwriting of that girl who, with little more than a kilo, had before her a story yet to be written, but that she would give for an entire book.
A story to read, uncorking, of course, a bottle of La Florens, a wine with a story worth telling. And meet.