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
