Victor Van Keuren writes Victor Van Keuren is a native Californian and former wine professional having worked for Importers, Distributors, hotel groups and restaurants on both coasts of America. These days he lives in Germany, the temple of Riesling, and enjoys wine and it’s endlessly enriching contribution to culture, art, food and place to himself and the world
Ode to Mencía
They thought you were ordinary,
a workhorse vine in forgotten valleys,
a name scribbled on co-op tanks,
churned for bulk,
poured without memory.
But even then
on those hills, slate-skinned and whispering
you were dreaming.
You began in Bierzo,
though your roots may speak Portuguese
Jaen, they call you across the border
but here, beneath the Cantabrian clouds,
your voice found its accent.
A voice that does not shout,
does not seduce with perfume like Tempranillo,
nor clothe itself in the darkness of Syrah.
You sing in mineral and redcurrant,
iron and cherry leaf,
a high note of violet that appears
only when the glass tilts into light.
The winemakers did not always listen.
They let you overproduce,
stretch your sugars until your soul thinned.
They made you a ghost
of what you could become.
But the soil remembered.
In the steep vineyards of Ribeira Sacra,
where the Sil River coils like smoke
between granite cliffs and Roman terraces,
you clung to the angles like a secret.
Terraces stacked like offerings to gods
long gone.
And still, you grew.
In autumn, old men with hands like bark
stooped to gather you
crates balanced on backs,
paths carved by goat and memory.
They did not call it heroism.
They called it harvest.
You are a grape of patience.
You do not rise in thunder.
Your revolution came on quiet feet,
through the eyes of those who saw the old vines
not as relics,
but as vessels.
They spoke your name again,
not as filler
but as elegy and hymn.
Raúl Pérez walked your hills barefoot,
searching for your pulse in the stones.
Álvaro Palacios,
with his mind full of Priorat
and his heart in Bierzo,
believed in you
when belief was thin.
They vinified you without artifice.
No makeup. No mask.
You, Mencía,
stripped bare
and suddenly radiant.
Then came the world’s gaze,
drawn not to flash
but to a kind of truth
that clings to the tongue
long after the bottle
is quiet.
They tasted slate and shadow,
mountain air and the cool hush of forest paths.
Red fruit sharpened by wind.
An echo of wild thyme,
the faintest bitterness of crushed seeds.
Not easy. Never easy.
But honest.
You traveled again
into the hands of Californians,
their sun warm and eager,
and Australians, curious and bright.
You found new languages,
but never forgot your mother tongue.
Even in other soils, you whispered of home
the terraces of Amandi,
the gray light of Valdeorras,
the cracked quartz of Corullón.
You are a grape of place.
Your soul is tethered to slope and wind,
to the rhythm of Atlantic rain,
to the patient muscle of those
who carry baskets down impossible paths
and speak to the vines
as if to children.
You are not ambitious.
You are relentless.
You do not rise to conquer,
but to endure.
And now they write about you
in sommelier handbooks,
your name spoken with reverence
in rooms where once it was forgotten.
They call you elegant,
aromatic,
a grape with a future.
But you have always had a future.
It was the world
that was slow to catch up.
You do not need oak to dress you.
You do not need the swagger
of extraction or alcohol.
You are beautiful in tension
in that knife-edge between fruit and acid,
structure and silk, muscle and breath.
Drinkers find stories in your glass.
Of fog and foxglove.
Of black tea and rain on iron.
Of old boots slapping wet stone
in a vineyard too steep for tractors
but not for love.
You pair not with luxury,
but with earth.
With jamón sliced thin,
with lentils and slow-cooked boar,
with octopus dusted in paprika
and potatoes that carry the sea’s whisper.
You are not the wine of kings.
You are the wine of poets,
herders,
stone lifters,
and those who know
that the world is not always loud
when it is beautiful.
So this is your song, Mencía
not a hymn of triumph,
but a quiet flame that refuses to die,
that licks at the corners of tradition
until it glows with something new.
You are not the future of wine,
You are its reminder
That greatness can hide in forgotten rows,
that time and tenderness
can coax a whisper into song.
And when the last bottle is poured,
and the last vineyard worker
walks home beneath the stars,
you will remain,
rooted in slope and silence,
listening,
waiting,
growing still.
Image by diane555 via iStock.
