Some men are born out of their due place

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Manzanilla at sunset on Bajo de Guía beach at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, my spiritual home.

"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.

Peregrino (pilgrim) & Irmandinho (Brother) de la Irmandade de Vinhos Galegos (Brotherhood of Galician Wines), Santiago de Compostela. (Self portrait.)

Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deeprooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.

At Pena das Donas, Ribeira Sacra in the morning light .

(Photograph by Basilio Izquierdo, former winemaker at CVNE.)

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest." - - The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham (who spent time in Spain and wrote about it.)

With the Bodegueros Artesanos, Val do Salnés, Rías Baixas, Galicia, producers of natural, native yeast, own-clone, terruño-laced, spoofulation-free Albariños of character, style, grace, balance, charm and breed. The taste of their unique wines is driven by individuality, not what "the market is asking for." They make some of the most intriguing and best white wines of Spain.

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