Bullas and Wine

Our friends Jan and Marjon who live here permanently are taking us to Bullas, a town that lends its name to one of the three Denominación de Origen (DO) wine regions in Murcia. This is the equivalent of the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) and is meant to signify wines of superior quality, i.e. those you don’t clean your paint brushes in.

We’re visiting Bullas to check out its wine heritage, and start at the Tourist Information Office that is also the wine museum. When we arrive, there’s a power cut in progress and much apologising from the information desk as we can’t therefore do the museum tour. But luck is with us and electricity is restored even as the info lady is apologising.

The tour starts with a presentation of the Bullas DO region and its natural suitability for producing high quality wine. A film in an adjacent room shows mystic wine-associated images from the region. Bullas produced everyday wine until the 1980’s when new wineries with modern equipment justified the DO status in 1994.

The real meat of the museum is downstairs in the original early 19^th century cellars of the Melgares de Aguilar family. We descend.

A display shows artefacts connected with wine culture in past ages, including the iconic Roman statue of the “Child of the Grapes” visible in the above photo. However, the displays are mainly geared to showing how wine was produced when the cellar was functioning as part of the winery, and this is the most interesting part.

First job: pick the grapes. Then transport them to the floor above the cellar where they are crushed, originally by treading and pressing but latterly done mechanically. The grape juice then ran down pipes through the upstairs floor into channels in the cellar and was distributed into earthenware jars set in the cellar floor. The example below uses water.

There were 112 of these earthenware jars laid out as in the next photo giving the huge total capacity of 350,000 litres.

Finally, after 4 months fermentation, the wine was manually pumped out, some into oak casks that would give it a distinctive flavour.

After the museum we go the house of Don Pepe Marsilla in another part of town. This family owned the museum winery. The house dates from 1723, but was extensively updated in 1900 by Don Jose Marsilla. The house is preserved in its 1900 format with original décor and period (but not original) furnishings.

A guide takes us from the museum to the house which he unlocks especially for us; thereafter he hands over to the hi-tech installed guide system where the imagined voice of Don Blas Marsilla, Don Jose’s son, or the maid’s voice, describes each room and aspects of their lifestyle. They speak in beautiful Oxford English. We start in the study with Don Blas.

As the voice is pointing out features in the room, the lights dim and brighten to highlight those features. All very sophisticated, but it gives us photographers a problem because no sooner have you pointed the camera to take a shot when the lights go out. So the picture above looks like Don Blas needs to put another peseta (the currency at the time) in the meter.

The 1900 refurbishment owes much to the Modernist movement in Spain of that time. This corresponds to Art Nouveau elsewhere in Europe. The hall and staircase are an example.

However, the main bedroom still retains that heavy furniture look that could almost be Medieval. Hope the large cross hanging over his head is well secured to the wall.

The dining room is traditional with a highly decorated (modernist?) ceiling, barely visible in the photo. It is noticeable that, although the house is extensive, the rooms themselves are all quite small.

The most remarkable feature of the house for me was the flooring which I could relate to Art Nouveau I’d come across. Please note that I beat the light dimmer in this photo!

The house kitchen again wasn’t that grand or spacious, but a bit bigger than our caravan kitchen.

Back to the vino. The house had its own winery with a full-size wine press and the same earthenware jar fermenting arrangement as in the museum cellar.

There were racks of original drinking utensils, and basket and rope woven items. This next photo shows how they made rope-soled shoes. We’d call them espadrilles. The loose rope is on the floor, coiled up on the table and then shaped into a shoe sole. The canvas upper is stitched on and- bingo- a shoe for the servants or workers.

The commentary was at pains to describe the house servants as well looked after and happy. It seems that Don Jose’s son, Don Blas, was especially keen on employees’ welfare. This would be well above average treatment from  landowners of that day as Spain retained a basically medieval land ownership, i.e. in the hands of the gentry, that had never been modified by an industrial revolution, so many workers on the land were little more than serfs. This subsistence poverty drove Spanish workers increasingly towards left-wing politics which finally erupted in the Civil War of 1936.

The day opened a window into Spanish life Jane and I knew little about, and a lifestyle very different from the Costa economy we are familiar with. Thanks for a very interesting trip.