Finca La Rosendo

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After a week of not having any contact with the outside world, here I sit in a swanky hotel in San Rafael with the sun streaming in the windows and thoughts of Finca La Rosendo swirling about in my head. To describe the finca after being there only 6 days would take pages and pages. Here and now then, the highlights.

Situated about 20 minutes south of San Rafael, tiny little Finca La Rosendo gets lost amongst all the heavy hitters in the region. On the short bus ride to get there, all you see are hectares and hectares (miles dont exist down here, see?) of grapevines. La Rosendo has those too, but they chose to do things a bit differently.

For several years now on-again, off-again couple Virginia and Alejandro have accepted WWOOfers to stay with them and learn the lay of the land. They are your typical live-off-the-land, pot-smoking, white man dred-having team, and they believe that the majority of what they consume should come as a direct result of the work that they put in. They have a rather large subsistence only garden, a compost area, around 10 chickens and 2 roosters, 4 sheep, 2 amazing dogs named Milton and Doris, a vineyard which produces Malbec, Syrah and a sweet dessert wine, and fruit trees. Their house was built using sustainable practices, and my casita was built as an addition a few years back to house volunteers that swing through. It is built of straw, mud, bamboo and wine bottles. No joke.

Every day I wake up, usually freezing, and start a fire from wood I have gathered in my small wood stove in the corner of the casita. As caffeine is a necesity, I head over to my kitchen, which is a desk with a gas tank beneath it with two burners sittig on top. Only one of them works. I start the hot water for my instant coffee, and sit wrapped in a blanket next to my fire, watching the sheep pass by my window on the way out to pasture. The bathroom is a dry pit surrounded by a homemade wood enclosure built by past WWOOFer, French Simon. Ive heard a lot of stories about French Simon, mainly that he was over-sensitive and was really into building this pit toilet. For this I will be forever grateful to French Simon, because the old pit toilet only had 3 standing walls. Ahem.

Around 10 am I go to the garden to pick up the agachada (I dont know how to say this in English... it is an implement like a ho but sharper and wider. Also, please keep your ho jokes to yourself.) and head to the back of the vineyards to begin clearing the ditch of dry grasses for next month, when the government will turn the water back on again. Because of the fact that this area is a desert, all of the water is controlled by the government. Because Finca La Rosendo is organic, we cannot simply spray chemicals on things to make them go away. We have to machete the hell out of them. It provides a good time to think and listen to the sheep munching away.

After about 2 hours of clearing the ditches, we head in to have lunch. Virginia is an amazing cook- everything we eat comes out of their garden or from a garden of a friend that lives nearby. She bakes the bread herself, and they have canned jams from all the fruit that they grow here in the summer. Also, there is of course always wine. We drink wine with lunch, and if conversation is going well and we are enjoying ourselves, sometimes we drink too much. Thusly, lunch can often be a 2 hour affair. I love this part of the day.

When lunch time is over and we are all sleepy from the wine, the real work begins. We clean and disinfect bottles, fill them with delicious red wine, and then cork and label them. This process takes hours, as all of it is done by hand by the three of us. We put on music and work silently, or we talk about politics, about what goes on in the US, or oddities of the Argentine language (what does pibe mean again?).

Working until the sun goes down ensures that Im back in my casita to make dinner around 7 pm. I have the evenings to cook, drink wine (one of the included items in my weekly food basket), read, write and think.

Tomorrow is my 31st birthday. Part of me wishes that I were home for that- with friends and family doing it up like last year. However, Alejandro assured me today when he dropped me off at the bus stop that the three of us would be having a small fiesta tomorrow night in celebration of my 31st year... and Ill take that, too. It isnt everyday that you get to bring in another year with homemade wine, hard work, and good conversation.

Love to all. I miss you a ton.

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Comments

[David & Sonia Weston]

Hello & Happy..........
Happy Belated Birthday! Maybe we can do the Cowfish thing like last year (at for a cocktail) when you return to the Queen City. Your Grandma Inez is here with us at Weston Woods for a couple of days, I'll let her read your latest entry tomorrow. Your Mom has keep her up to date with other entries. Speaking of that your are a wonderful writer! I admire (& envy) your talent. Stay warm, if that's possible. Love, hugs n' kisses, Aunt Sonia & Uncle Dave