Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [72]
From the shade of a bench-lined plaza and whimsical church, we could see RRR—the distillery for Chile’s oldest pisco. I remembered one of Darwin’s more agricultural observations: “The figs & grapes of Elqui are famous for their superiority & cultivated to great extent.” Darwin didn’t linger; agriculture didn’t much interest him and geology and mineral mines did.
We lingered. “We went looking for mines to inspect and couldn’t find any, so we inspected the pisco factory instead,” I said to Josh. “Come on.”
We crossed into a big adobe building and found the tasting room.
“RRR is the oldest pisco in Chile,” explained the man behind the counter. “Here.”
He set two wine glasses filled with a translucent yellowish liquid down in front of us.
I took a cautious sip and felt the cilia rising in alarm in my throat.
“Whaaa,” Josh sputtered, “that burns!” (“Liver solvent,” he later labeled it.)
The man explained that when Spanish settlers arrived in Pisco Elqui, they started growing grapes for wine. But because of Pisco Elqui’s wonderful climate of 320 sunny days a year, the grapes had a very high sugar content. (More sun means grapes produce more sugar.) When they made wine from the grapes, then further distilled the wine into almost pure alcohol, it retained some of its flavor. Some of its flavor. To the uninitiated, pisco tastes like Drano.
He took us on a tour of the pisco distillery, through the grape presses and stills and down to the wine cellar, where pisco aged in California oak barrels. In the cool darkness, he turned on a projector and showed us a movie, with English subtitles and set to inspirational music, about the history of RRR brand pisco. “The indigenous people had developed a culture perfectly suited to receive the Spanish settlers,” one subtitle read.
Josh and I snorted in chorus, disturbing a few Spanish tourists. “The primitive Indians were perfectly suited to receive the settlers,” Josh repeated under his breath. “It’s like an anthropologist’s nightmare.”
I liked the next phrase, too: “RRR, the pisco that conquered everybody else.”
The lights in the cellar came back on, and we wandered out into the bright sunlight. While Josh continued mumbling about primitive Indians, I caught up to the guide. “Did you know that when Darwin visited here, he wrote about the grapes?” I asked.
“He did?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting,” the guide said. “So did the French naturalist, Claudio Gay. He traveled here just after Darwin and wrote that these were the best grapes in Chile. It’s a very famous valley.”
“I’m not sure he made it all the way here, though,” I said. “Darwin wrote that he turned around at the meeting of the Rio Claro and Rio Elqui. Do you know where that is?”
“Sure,” he said. “The Rio Elqui flows out of this valley, and meets the Rio Turbio. Together, they form the Rio Claro.”
We had heard this answer earlier, but suddenly it made perfect sense. To Darwin, following the Rio Claro up the valley from the coast, the turnaround point would be the junction of the Rio Claro and Rio Elqui—and he probably never knew that the Rio Claro didn’t continue beyond that spot.
Josh and I left the distillery and got back in the car and drove north into the sinking sun, with the valley half shadow and half blinding light. The grape vines appeared to be on fire, speckled with flaming reds, oranges, and yellows and glowing in the saturated light. We reached the meeting of the Rio Turbio and the Rio Elqui in a small town called Rivadavia. Amidst small convenience stores and farmhouses, a handwritten sign tacked to one adobe building offered yoga and massage. “The primitive natives were perfectly suited to receive the American tourists,” Josh cracked.
Pulling off the highway, we hopped out and stumbled across a thick gravel bed toward the river. The green, turbid Rio Turbio flowed in from the east, splitting around a gravel bar but