Nine 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.

Leave them too long and the grapes are ruined. Pull them out too soon and the skin does not crack.

This is the escaldà. In Llíber I watched Ovidio Mas and his son do it the way their family always has. They work fast and without talking, and nobody looks at a clock. The timing lives in their hands. The father lifts the basket, the son tips it onto a canyís, a flat cane rack, and together they spread the bunches out. By then the next basket is already in the water.

The grapes come out a strange yellow gold, and they keep that colour all the way to the table.

Moscatel had to become raisins before it could be sold. Dried in the open, grapes take more than a month, and here the September rain can arrive without warning. Three wet days and the crop rots.

The hot bath cracks the waxy skin so the water inside can escape. The drying time drops to about nine days.

That small change built an economy. In the nineteenth century raisins from these hills sailed from Dénia to Britain, where they ended up in plum cakes. The railway reached Dénia in 1884 to carry the crop, and the harbour quay is still called the Moll de la Pansa, the raisin quay.

The escaldà also explains the riuraus, the long arched buildings you see all over the Marina Alta. Each one faces south, with a flat floor in front to catch the sun. In the morning the cane racks went out onto that floor. At dusk, or when clouds gathered over Montgó, they were carried back under the arches, away from the dew and the rain.

Around 1910 phylloxera destroyed the vines and the raisin trade collapsed. The riuraus stood empty across the countryside. Many are still there, and some now host markets and wine tastings.

Ovidio is a fifth-generation raisin maker, and the last commercial artisan who still does the escaldà. In 2025 the farmers' organisation ASAJA gave him its award for agricultural enterprise.

Almost none of his craft is written down. How much sosa, how many seconds, how to spread a rack so the air moves through it. All of it passes from father to son, by watching and doing.

Spain declared the escaldà part of its intangible cultural heritage in 2018. The title helps, but the tradition survives because families still do the work every September. Llíber holds a fair for it, and schools in Dénia bring children out to try the cauldron themselves.

Ovidio has a friend nearby who knows the value of his grapes. Winemaker Pepe Mendoza met him about twenty years ago, and Ovidio's Moscatel goes into Pepe's wine.

A raisin made this way is darker and more floral than the supermarket kind, and the Moscatel is still clear in every bite.

Come to Llíber in late summer, when the cauldrons are lit, and take a bag home with you.