THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE

摘要

The red clay of the Spanish island of Mallorca has been used as fertile ground for vineyards since the Romans planted the first vines in the second century BCE - Pliny wrote in Naturalis Historia that the wines of the Balearic Islands were some of the best in the whole of the Roman Empire. By the end of the 19th century, the island was exporting over 36 million litres of wine a year, and in 1913, the agricultural engineer Arnest Mestre opened the Estacio Enologica (Oenological Station) in Felanitx, a small town to the south-east of the island. Mestre was an advocate of agricultural cooperativism and, six years later, as the fragile Spanish Restoration began to topple, he oversaw the founding of a celler cooperatiu, or 'co-operative cellar', called Es Sindicat ('the union') for local winemakers and vineyards. The architect Guillem Forteza Pinya, who went on to become Palma's municipal architect, built a huge factory complex just across the railway line from the first building, where more than a thousand producers could come together, offering farmers without their own winery a place to process their harvest.