The man who calls his oven a Maserati
Stories from the field,
where food begins.
Reporting on regeneration, biodiversity, food heritage and the people keeping this knowledge alive.
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12 April 2026The most botanically crowded mountain in Europe
Around 650 plant species grow on Montgó. Eduardo Fernández's bees visit almost all of them. Bees fly up to three kilometres from the hive, so his colonies cover almost the whole natural park. Whatever flowers, they visit.
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26 April 2026What regeneration is not
Regenerative is now on wine labels, hotel websites, restaurant menus, tourism strategies and skincare. It has had the same arc as sustainable. Useful term, then popular term, then a term that means whatever the person saying it needs it to mean.
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3 May 2026The season nobody films
August is the month when the least is happening in the fields here. The vines are waiting. The olives are small and green and months away. The citrus is invisible. The rice is standing in water doing nothing anyone can see. It is hot enough that sensible work stops at noon.
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18 May 2026What you are actually driving through
I have done that drive hundreds of times. Out of Xàbia, past the shoulder of the Montgó, inland through Pego, then either north towards the Safor or west into the mountains where the road narrows and the villages get very small.
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30 July 2026A grape with a memory
Pepe Mendoza gets the same question at every tasting and answers it with enormous patience. No, Giró is not Garnacha. He will explain why for as long as anybody wants to listen, and he has been explaining it for years.
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25 September 2026Nine days instead of a month
First the water has to boil. A fire of thin vine prunings burns under an iron cauldron. Into the water go sosa, a caustic soda, with a branch of olive and a few herbs. Then a wide basket of Moscatel grapes goes in, for only a few seconds.
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25 September 2026The man who calls his oven a Maserati
Five minutes. That is how long a coca spends in the oven at Pont Sec, and Pep Romany times it the way a man times things when he used to work in physics and hospital computing before he ever ran a kitchen.
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25 September 2026The house with no electricity
High above Xaló, Carolina Pateman Ivars cooks for a full dining room over two fires and a wood oven. Her father bought the ruin in the early seventies and spent fifteen years rebuilding it by hand.
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25 September 2026Five hundred grams of seed
The rice that made Pego famous vanished in the 1960s. Somebody found half a kilo of it.
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25 September 2026Farming without water
Benifallim has been losing people since 1857. Miguel Ángel García González came back to it, and reads the health of his olive groves by counting wild orchids.
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25 September 2026The man who curates fruit
Vicente Todolí ran Tate Modern. He now looks after around five hundred kinds of citrus in a village of a thousand people, and he calls it a museum.
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