Just before the end of last year, I went back to the old Felanitx wine cooperative, the Sindicat, long since closed for good. The place reminds me of an archeological site to be discovered and unearthed. Es Sindicat also reminds me a bit of the tombs of Xian in China with the soldiers of the Emperor’s army. Ok, that may be stretching the imagination a bit but, believe me, the rows and rows of concrete vessels and tanks have a bit of a mighty army troop about them, an air of warriors of wine-making so to speak.

Luckily, in the Mallorca of today, wine production has gone much smaller-sized and is now more of a craft rather than an industry, give or take the odd exception. And that is how it should be. Today’s bodegas may produce only between 10,000 and 35,000 bottles of their nectar per year, an amount that would have been held in just three of the containers in today’s photo. But, here comes the but, the quality of today’s wine is much better than it has been at the time of the Celler Cooperatíu de Felanitx, or so I was told by friends who worked there for the odd 20 years or so until it was closed for good and they were dismissed and made unemployed.

Cheers, or better still, Salut.

The photo was taken in Felanitx, Mallorca, Baleares, Spain. The date: December 29th, 2011. The time was 13:06:29.