Flaherty Wines

Ed writes: Our caretaker in Cauquenes is Ismael Enriques, who is 70 years old. He says that when he was a kid, the País vineyard on our property was already old. He remembers helping his dad put the roof on the adobe house on our property when he was ten years old. Don Ismael has lived his whole life here and is tough as nails. He once mentioned that he had been to Buchupureo, a beach town on the Maule coast, to harvest wheat. When I asked how he got there, he said it was a two-day walk.

Now, Ismael does not exactly work for me as an employee. He runs his five horses on our property and keeps up the fences so that the horses don’t run off. We negotiate (trato) every job that has to be done in the vineyard and on the property, and of course he knows the true value better than I do. It is expected that I bargain, but I’m not a great negotiator. So, while I generally do not just accept his offer, I often add on some details to the original job rather than haggle over the price. For example, when we prepared the land for the vineyard last year, he quoted the job to cut down the espino bushes and haul them to charcoal hut. He then used the wood to make charcoal (carbón), and we split the end product 50/50. He uses his share to heat his house, and I use mine for barbecuing. We sell whatever I think I won’t use. Last winter he grew potatoes on a patch that we cleared, and we split the harvest 50/50. This system of sharecropping is the way it works out here. The owner contributes the land and water, and sharecropper, or mediero, puts in the work, seed, and fertilizer. The crop is then divided 50/50.

It seems funny to give  a 70-year-old man such physically demanding jobs that I would struggle to do myself, but what I sense is that work is the very center of his daily life. If he wasn’t doing a job for me, he would find something else to do. Out here they cultivate wheat by horse and hand—a backbreaking job even for the young, but Ismael is still at it. His wife says she is too old now to keep up, but in her day she would have put me to shame. I believe her.