Pumalek recalls a family history that like many others is woven throughout generations, loaded with wonderful and precious memories, life experiences and nostalgia. The Lambrusco grape and the wine that comes from it are part of this history.
Descendants of Catalans, my father Jorge Aregall and my mother Carmen Pujol brought from their trip to Europe in the 70’s a Lambrusco grape vine. They meant to use it to give shade to the patio in the long backyard of their house in Barrio Cívico that, in that time, was called Quinta Agronómica, a property intended to the study of viticulture owned by the University of Cuyo. These vines, though they were not many, were enough to cool off from Mendoza’s scorching summer and make wine. Their trunks got so big that as children we could climb them up and down during a “secret mission”.
Thick with grapes, every year they were harvested to make three to four hundred bottles of craft Lambrusco wine carefully filled with a funnel and a jug and then hand-corked with natural corks.
The bottles were aged by vintage and placed on wooden racks specially built for this purpose in the house basement that was fresh, dark and a bit humid; conditions that guaranteed an unbeatable aging. Safe and neat, each bottle lay horizontally, awaiting their turn to be written on with chalk the vintage year.
There still rest in the basement, as if time had stopped, covered with dust and barely visible chalk, the last bottles that survived my father’s passing. We have also dearly kept the table, the blue chalk and the glass in which he tasted the wines.
For years, these Lambrusco bottles witnessed and leaded countless family and friends reunions, sumptuous feasts of asados and paellas, parties and whichever opportunity that may have arisen. The wine was more than enough and was the cause and effect of a successful celebration.
My father, slender but strong with a neat moustache and swept-back, brilliantined hair, elegant and well-dressed “I drink Lambrusco, only Lambrusco”, used to claim. And that was clearly seen in the light of evidence.
I’m filled with joy every time I remember those precious moments during my childhood and youth together with my siblings in that house under my parents’ wings.
This is why, in memory of my parents, my wife, my children Laura, Franco, Gonzalo and Valentín, and I decided to start “Bodega y Viñedos Pumalek”. We exclusively produce Lambrusco Grasparossa with vines brought from Italy in 2006 and planted in our own estate, Finca Carmina, in Ugarteche, Luján de Cuyo, Mendoza.
From these vines we make Lambrusco wine that treasures all the passion, love, dreams and hope with which my parents made those first bottles of Lambrusco in their own house.
Eduardo Aregall