Can Rich Vinyard

It's an early morning in autumn in the Can Rich vineyard close to Sant Antoni. The air is so heavy with the humidity of the night before that you can almost drink it. Viktor heaves the sticky black bucket up from where it is resting on his hip and empties its contents - dark red, hand picked Tempranillo grapes - into the empty steel container. You can see the beads of sweat on his forehead glistening in the early morning sunlight despite the blue baseball cap he is wearing, with its black bull motif set against the Spanish flag.

But Viktor is satisfied. He is here with childhood friends from Paraguay and a couple of Ecuadorians, all of them about thirty years of age. For one whole month, they will be at Can Rich, harvesting the vineyard's grapes. For eight euros an hour, for between ten and twelve hours a day. Names such as Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon or Moscatel mean little to the South American day worker. "I prefer drinking beer," he says, curtly, and the others agree with him, but they know that they are picking grapes so that the vintners can transform them into exquisite vintages.

During the grape harvest for vintners such as Toni Costa, a single day can last 30 hours or more. He is not just the manager of Can Rich; he also has to oversee his own Can Maymó wine label, in his spare time. The Ibizan manages over 23 hectares of wine country, 17 of them on the Can Rich property, and six covered in vines around the Sant Mateu hills.

As he sits there on the veranda of the Can Rich finca, shaded by the vines - of course - that grow nearby and gazing out over the deep green hillside towards the huge, distant pines that sprout like sun umbrellas over the carpet of grapes, you get the feeling that he is part of this landscape, that even the blood in his veins is made of wine. "There's no need to hide behind the big names any more where quality is concerned," he says, as he starts his homage to the new generation of island wines. A lot of catching up has been done over the past few years, with vast sums being invested in 'state of the art' equipment and importing invaluable expertise. Of course, the island wine still suffers from its reputation as a rough and ready product, but the much maligned table wine known as vino payés on the Balearic islands is dying out. "There are still a few individuals out there producing it, but it's becoming rarer," says Toni.

In the meantime, the grape pickers from Paraguay and Ecuador are having a competition in the narrow passageways between the rows of vines. Viktor and his friends are making their way up the aisle next to the tractor that pulls the steel container forward a couple of metres a minute. To their left, the Ecuadorians are trying to keep up with the pace. Whenever the gap between the two groups gets too wide, Pep shouts at the stragglers from the seat of his tractor, encouraging them to get a move on.

This time, it's the men from Paraguay who have been left so far behind that they are wasting far too much time running up to the tractor each time they want to dump their load in the container. So Pep, who himself owns a small agricultural business not far from Can Rich and used to work as a cook in a restaurant until just a few years ago, steps on the brake. He lets some of the men work more slowly while he encourages the others to catch up, waiting until both teams have drawn level with the container.

Pep, the Ibicenco, lends a hand

Toni Costa's pride at what he has achieved hasn't blinded him to everyday realities. High quality wine production still has a long way to go on the Balearic islands. The first high quality vines were planted at Can Maymó in 1990, and Can Rich followed seven years later. "We have to improve and there's still so much we need to learn," insists the son of a family that has been producing wine for generations.

He is optimistic about the future of the 2006 crop, believing that it will help him to further improve a wine that has already won many plaudits. Good rainfall levels last autumn and winter meant that the ground reservoirs were filled to capacity and the vines could be supplied with water throughout the hot, dry summer needed to bring out the best in them. The grapes are small and hard. A vintner's dream come true.

"If they're large, that usually means that they contain a lot of water," Toni Costa informs us, and reaches out for a bunch of grapes to demonstrate his lesson in wine growing. "That means that they lose some of their acidity and that's bad news if you're producing wine." Although wine production is a science in its own right, all that is needed to pick the fruit is a sharp pair of secateurs, a strong back and a certain resistance to heat.

For Viktor and his colleagues, grape picking comes as a welcome relief from exhausting construction work. All they have to do is master the movements needed to use the secateurs, snip off the bunches of grapes and transfer them to the black bucket lying on the reddish ground at their feet. Because the earth in the vine fields is damp, the South Americans in Viktor's field look less like day workers out grape picking than gold diggers in the heart of the Amazon. A few years ago, island vintners such as Toni Costa would only have handled the Monastrell grape variety. It is a robust variety that needs little water and can be found across the Mediterranean.

Back in 1990, Joan Bonet from Sant Mateu's Sa Cova vineyard was the first to recognise that something had to be done about this lack of variety. He was 49 at the time, and began to start looking for varieties that could be used to produce wine of the highest quality. From then on, he planted Tempranillo, Syrah, Merlot, Malvasia and Moscatel vines on his property, but still he wasn't satisfied. He spent a large sum on acquiring 'state of the art' machinery to carry out the various processes involved in producing wine. It was the start of a new era of winemaking on the island.

On arrival from the fields the grapes are put through a machine that automatically separates the grapes from the stalks. The stalks are then composted for use as fertilizer on the fields

It took five years to convince Can Maymó's Toni Costa that he too should take advantage of the modern winemaking options on offer. In 1997, when the owners of the Can Rich finca asked Toni Costa to help them develop their land - which until then had only been used to grow cereal crops - the vintner realised that he had made a good choice. So he got down to work and transformed the granary into an ultra modern wine cellar.

By the end of the morning, Viktor and his South American companions have filled the container to overflowing with grapes. For Pep, this boils down to a good three tonnes of hand picked Tempranillo grapes; for the grape pickers, it represents a half-hour break in the shade of the veranda. First of all, Viktor and the others visit the washroom to wash the sweat off their faces. Then, exhausted, they sit down on the wooden benches and start talking about home.

Pedro from Ecuador has spent enough time in Spain to know how to enchant listeners with tales of his homeland. He uses enthusiastic gestures to underscore stories about his village, Colta, located in the foothills of Chimborazo, the 6,310 metre volcano that filled Alexander von Humboldt with awe. Others look out over the vineyard without saying a word, thinking perhaps of the wives and children they had to leave behind to look for work. Meanwhile, Pep unloads the grapes outside the gates leading down to the wine cellar. A machine there will automatically separate the grapes from the stalks.

The conditions on Ibiza and Formentera are ideal for winegrowing, even though the humidity provides a climate in which the dreaded mould can thrive. To combat this, the vintners use biocides to prevent and kill off bacteria, viruses and a variety of fungi that would otherwise destroy their crops.

But however good the conditions may be, the winegrowers can only dream of vineyards the size of those found in La Rioja or Valdepeñas. About 30,000 hectares of land comprise the Valdepeñas label of origin (D.O. for Denominación de Origen). The combined efforts of the valiant vintners of Ibiza and Formentera amount to just 40 hectares. Or to put it another way, about half of the island of Ibiza would have to be covered in vines to achieve an area equivalent to that of Valdepeñas.

After pressing the grape juice is pumped into the fermentation tanks.

However, quantity is not the same thing as quality, concludes Xavier Álvarez, the manager of the Terramoll bodega, which has been in business since 2000. The smaller vintner doesn't stand a chance with the price fixing that goes on in the market. "We're never going to be able to compete with the big fish in terms of price," says Xavier Álvarez, whose latest rosé made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot was recently awarded a magnificent total of 85 points by the Spanish wine king, José Peñ?n.

This means that customers will have to pay between 20 and 30 percent more for the wine from Ibiza and Formentera than they would pay for a similar mass-produced wine. Álvarez, who is in his early forties, also sees winemaking as a way of continuing age old agricultural traditions that are in danger of dying out on Formentera. "What we're aiming for in the long term is a pretty risky undertaking. We want to prove that there are alternatives to making a quick buck with property deals," says the recent convert to the cause of winegrowing.

Picking grapes by hand the way Viktor and the other South Americans were doing in the fields of Can Rich, is basically a thing of the past. Machines are not only faster and more flexible, they are also cheaper in the long term. "But it's not worth investing in them here on Ibiza," says Toni Costa. "And it's an advantage for our customers because the rotten grapes are weeded out straight away." The bad grapes end up on the red clay earth and leave behind a trail that Hansel and Gretel would be proud of. Spanish people aren't interested in grape picking any more, says Pep, shaking his head, protected from the sun by a wide straw hat, but he's very satisfied with the South Americans, "they're very reliable".

It is still just grape juice: Toni Costa test its progress

According to Javier Escandell, a fixture on the Ibizan scene and the owner of the Enotecum chain of wine shops, the local wines still build their reputation through restaurants. This is not without its problems, however, on the one hand due to the recent - and in his view unjustifiable - increase in the price of local wines on restaurant wine lists. On the other hand, Javier Escandell would like to see restaurants making more creative choices when selecting wines to list. "The selections are usually very traditional." Restaurants are rarely open to trying out new products. The wine connoisseur also criticises individual retailers who are reluctant to stock local wines on their shelves.

Finally, Javier Escandell believes that it is the island inhabitants themselves who hold the key to making or breaking the local wines. Many still automatically associate wines from Ibiza and Formentera with rough and ready quality. This is an image that is hard to sell - which goes some way towards explaining the restaurants' and small businesses' unwillingness to offer the wines. People are going to have to start changing the way they think. "People here still confuse vino payés with the high quality wine produced using 'state of the art' techniques. It's time to change the way we think. Our wines are every bit as good as those coming out of La Rioja or Ribera del Duero." The wine merchant doesn't believe that the price of local wines, which is usually higher than the average, should be a decisive factor.

As the sun gradually tires and its rays lose their intensity, the working day is also drawing to a close for Viktor and the other South American fruit pickers. Once again, they have spent eleven hours working their way, metre by metre, through the aisles of the vineyard. Now their joints are aching and they are almost too tired to speak. "We'll just grab a bite to eat and then be off to bed," says Viktor, and the others nod. Tomorrow at eight o'clock, they'll all be back to start work again.