With just weeks to go before harvest in Rías Baixas, the region has been rocked by an unprecedented act of sabotage.
On the morning of 2 August, the members of the cooperative Viña Moraima discovered that over 900 vines had been intentionally cut at the trunk during the night, causing approximately €120,000 (£103,000) in damages.
‘Like losing a child’
The damaged plot covers approximately 7,000 m² and was the only vineyard owned collectively by Viña Moraima rather than by one of the cooperative’s individual members. It contained both centuries-old vines the cooperative was maintaining, as well as a four-year-old planting of Albariño and Caíño.
‘It’s like losing a child,’ said Viña Moraima’s winemaker Roberto Taibo. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to see 11 people – some of them in their 60s and 70s – crying, seeing what had happened.’
Some of the vines were nearly 200 years old and bore as-yet unidentified red grape varieties that were being studied by the Biological Mission of Galicia (MBG-CSIC), headquartered in Pontevedra. Viña Moraima estimates that only 5% of the damaged vines will be able to be recovered.
Open letter to the perpetrators
‘If what you wanted was to hurt us, congratulations, you succeeded,’ the cooperative wrote in an open letter to the saboteur(s) published on its website. ‘Your efforts (or of those who did the dirty work for you, because we’re sure that besides being a criminal, you’re a coward) paid off.’
‘You, dear saboteur, who didn’t play under a vine as a child, are not yet aware of the true nature of what you’ve done; because we’re not only talking about money […] The vine is memory, wisdom, history. But it’s also fragile, and just one cut is enough to make it all disappear forever,’ the cooperative wrote.
Centuries-old vineyards vandalised at Viña Moraima, Barros, Pontevedra, Alto Salnés. Credit: Roberto Taibo, Viña Moraima
So far the only clue comes from the CCTV camera of a neighbouring industrial heating and gas plant, which captured the first vines coming down just after midnight, the morning of 2 August.
The growers believe that several people were involved, as cutting hundreds of vines in a short amount of time would be too much work for one person. The perpetrator(s) worked methodically, presumably using small electric secateurs and chainsaws.
Viña Moraima said that the events were not an act of revenge or a settling of scores. ‘There are no debts, we have no problems with anyone and we’re very healthy… or we were until Friday,’ cooperative spokesman Roberto Rivas told El País. Rivas said that the cooperative members ‘have a suspicion and the Guardia Civil is working with that hypothesis’.
In the meantime, the cooperative has made an appeal for anyone with leads or relevant information to come forward.
Founded in 2006 and located in Barro (Pontevedra, Alto Salnés), Viña Moraima is a small cooperative in the Rías Baixas appellation, with 11 members and a production of around 100,000 bottles annually.