Iβve spent the past two months in Bolivia, working on the harvest for a winery called
@jardinocultowines (trans: βSecret Gardenβ). They have a vineyard in a place called the Cinti Valley. It is the most staggeringly beautiful and unusual place Iβve ever picked grapes in.
Cinti is shaped by an 80km-long canyon of striated pink sandstone at 2,300m altitude in southern Bolivia. Between vertical 600m rock faces that appear hyperreal in dazzling high-altitude sunlight, narrow lush green oases skirt the Rio Chica and Rio Grande rivers like Edenic gardens.
They are in fact forest or βarbolitaβ vineyards, where criolla grape vines are trained up 3m-high molle (pink peppercorn), taco (white carob) and chanya (canβt translate, but they produce small, plum-like fruits that taste of frangipane) trees, interplanted with citrus, apple, plum, quince, fig and pomegranate trees, and various vegetable crops.
Walking down a row of these vines is like being in a lost world, dappled shadows from the fronds of the molle trees providing shade from the rarefied sunlight, vines with trunks almost as thick as the ancient trees that support them, their branches whorling gargantuanly in a vineyard version of a Henri Rousseau painting.
When you manage to peer above the vegetation, the gigantic pink rock of the canyon meets your gaze. It is a scene you canβt quite assimilate. And itβs where Jardin Oculto grows their grapes. No photo I take would ever do it justice. It should be on some sort of UNESCO heritage list β as the silver mining town of PotosΓ further north, whose wines and spirits Cinti used to provide for, actually is.
To the unfamiliar traveller or nomadic winemaker, it is pretty much an hallucination.
