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Manutahi, the miracle of the first wine grown on Easter Island
Easter Island (Chile), Nov 22 (EFE).- In 1866, the French priests Kaspar Zumbohm and Theodore Escolan arrived on Easter Island loaded with various flowers and plants to expand the first mission, established months earlier by the navigator and slave trader Jean Baptiste Dutrou-Bornie. Among them, various vines from Europe intended for the production of mass wine, which were never harvested and which grew wild, forgotten in the leafy volcanic gardens that separate the thousands of caves that pierce the island. Until in 2008, José Mingo, a wine industrialist with years of experience in the best vineyards in Chile, saw them appear among the craters, next to a row of collapsed moais, and harbored a dream that has become a reality a decade later. thanks to tenacity, experimentation and above all, feeling. Manutahi, the first wine grown, harvested and bottled on this lonely Polynesian island, considered the navel of the planet. “That’s where this great dream of making wine in Rapa Nui began,” he says with his partner, José Tuki, the farmer who adds to the theory of his namesake the ancestral secrets of a land rich in minerals, scarce water and winds. very humid. “It was born with two ideas, one to make the first wine on the island with the agricultural management of the Rapa Nui, and two, to produce a wine for the Rapanui, for the people, and that this later contaminates the rest of the communities as a sustainable agricultural alternative”, explained to Efe Mingo, who for the first time opened the vineyard to the press. INDIGENOUS STRAINS Obsessed with the idea, “the two Josés” set out on a path with no defined destination: Mingo sent samples of the strains brought by missionaries to the University of Tenerife, a volcanic Spanish island that also produces wine, to unravel their genetic material. And Tuki made room among pineapples, avocados, mangoes, and other fruit trees on his small piece of land to place rows of solitary stakes with vine shoots, without wire to unite them, as was done in bygone times. In addition, he imagined a system of cisterns to collect rainwater, fed with fish from the craters; He introduced drip irrigation – a novelty on the island, with drought problems – and relied on the algae that grows on the Pacific coast as a substrate for a topsoil that rests on a bed of lava. “Last year we had a very difficult harvest because we were in a pandemic. In addition, a large part of the bunches were eaten by Polynesian chickens, something they had never seen. In the end, ten liters came out, these four bottles that we treasure as material for future generations Mingo says. A small victory -not yet uncorked- turned into the seed of a fantasy come true: this year they hope to harvest 250 kilograms of grapes of different kinds and produce the first 250 bottles of Manutahi, a Rapanui word meaning “the first bird” and which has a deep sentimental meaning for both. A SUSTAINABLE HERITAGE “We want to see which varietal is best for making wine of an acceptable level, a good level, and then getting better and better as the plants mature,” says Mingo as Tuki looks at the blackened earth that she cleans every day, without pesticides or other chemicals, with a hoe and callus. “The characteristic on this island is the soil, the water. You have to have water because it is a very poor topsoil. I realized that the gilthead that is below this bold was that it conserves much more moisture,” explains Toki, who insists on the idea of legacy. “My ancestors hope that future generations can contribute something to this island. I think this is history,” he underlines. AN ETHNOLOGICAL LABORATORY Marcelo Lorca, an agricultural engineer from southern Chile, oversees a process that is much like a scientific experiment to Mingo’s passion and Tuki’s wisdom. “The potential that we can have on the island is very different from the behavior of the same variety in an area with a Mediterranean climate. Therefore, future development follows two lines: the work of the ancestral strains and the introduction of healthy materials of origin French and Spanish. There is a lot to experience, to discover, to investigate”, affirms Lorca. Earlier harvests, much thicker skins due to the sun and rain, and a meatier grape in the Garnacha, Syrah, Chardonay and País varieties that point to a wine produced with heart and a vocation to last, like the mysterious moais that whisper and they protect this piece of land in the middle of the Pacific. Javier Martín (c) EFE Agency
