Artful Days
As a false-spring ends a sumptuous summer of get-togethers
If you’d rather listen to this week’s blog I’ve started recording them each week, but do look at the pictures!
There’s no such thing as normal weather anywhere anymore I don’t suppose.
Medronho Jorge has talked about how September rain gives his booze-berry bushes the shove they need to start fattening and ripening fruit ahead of picking, fermenting and distilling, and for the first time in a few years that rain actually arrived on request.
It’s not been ideal for our final surge of friends visiting the valley and bringing a wonderfully hectic season of stays to a close, but it’s created a fabulous false spring that’s tricked plants into greening our blackened hillsides and given our Kikuyu grass a new lease of life.
It’s also provided incredible sunsets and even more impressive red skies in the morning...both as a sailor’s warning, and to give us a wonderful start to the day.
They are also ripe pickings for an artist who loves big skies in bold colours, and even prompted Ed Sumner to reach for neon paint to recreate a sunset so crazy it looks scarcely possible.
Ed, Rach and Daisy returned for their fourth trip to Vale das Estrelas, this time with their Swedish pals in tow.
Ed brought his sunset oil painting with him as a wonderful gift to brighten up the house – you may recognise it as the photo I’ve been using for a while as the top banner of these emails.
He also did another Facebook live-from-Portugal painting class for the followers of his Cheese & Wine Painting Club across the world.
After painting our valley in oils last time around, Ed chose charcoal on paper and set up on a nearby beach with a suitably dramatic cliff-scape to teach a lesson in light and shade, inspiring some amazing impressions.
Ed’s just made the switch to Substack for his weekly newsletter so you can find him and sign up with him here.
It may be November, but the beaches and the sea are still warm enough for a nap and a dip – or an elaborate sandcastle-building session – which is lucky when you have a flurry of small people to entertain.
Hot on the heels of the Sumners and the Swedish Malmvärns, we welcomed our old Bangkok friends Aela & Lukas and Isabell & Adam each with two children for us to get to know far too long after our last reunion.
Young kids made for evenings ending at reasonable hours, but our friends’ interest in the flavours of Portugal did give us something of a food frenzy finish to the long summer at our favourite spots. The diet begins today.
We also did our bit to provide some great Alentejo wines: from Esporão, Vidigueira and Herdade do Peso, to the talha or Roman amphora-style wines of Geraçoes da Talha and the natural wines and palhete from Cebolal.
On the subject, I’ve been neglecting my wine blog for a little while now, but do sign up if you haven’t already as I’ll be posting something fun later this week.
We’ve been so fortunate to have some great friends and remarkable people from our past staying with us this year.
It’s perhaps the last real chance we’ll have for such a fun-packed summer with the construction work progressing well and apartment rentals going live next year.
The new buildings are taking shape, but there’s still well over a year’s worth of work getting things finished and preparing ourselves for the big reinvention as wine tasting hosts and hoteliers!
To be honest there’s so much to do before the end of this year in terms of phase two of the building, and the wine podcast has also been neglected while I’ve been helping Joanne Major produce a podcast for her new website SplittingUp.com.
But this last week was a wonderful chance to reunite with our smarty-party people from Bangkok days where Ana and I met and married and where our little band of diplomats and journalists really did have more fun than anyone else.
Aela – then called Callan and then an Al Jazeera English reporter – was the one who phoned Ana to tell her I was alive when reports of my death were exaggerated by ABC Australia on Twitter.
She’s now a Streiff and a start-up entrepreneur using virtual reality technology for high risk safety training backed by big investors and pushing boundaries.
Her husband Lukas was a management consultant and is now a German foreign service diplomat on loan to the European Union, and it was the first time we’d met the children.
Back in the day we held a lot of fancy dress parties: so many so, that when Isabell the then (and current) EU diplomat produced a gift photo calendar one Christmas, each page featured a different party from that month the previous year.
Her husband Adam is doing his bit for world peace at the Centre for Human Dialogue where amid everything else he hosts a podcast. Both families now live in Brussels.
But life changes: we didn’t even take the open goal that Halloween offered us on their first night in the valley. We had to leave that to Oda & Derek in Los Angeles!
Mr Poodlehead and an array of wigs made an appearance, and the silent disco headphones they invested in after loving them at our Northumberland wedding were a huge hit (we really must get some of those).
It was just a great chance to reconnect and spend time with wonderful people.
That’s one of the reasons we decided to give up our nomadic lifestyle in random countries on random continents – to settle somewhere not too far away from friends and family.
(Of course our daughter Oda is the outlier in LA, but we’re already plotting and scheming to see her this Christmas).
The help our friends are giving us is mostly through advice and support...and asking awkward questions to test us and to make us think.
As we bounce between the optimistic and the pessimistic ends of the scale, usually at different times (and sometimes daily), it’s great to be told by outsiders how wonderful our plans are and how beautiful our little piece of Portugal appears to be.
The advice is also to be aware of our limitations and our ambitions, to stick to our business plan but not be afraid to pivot, and to look after ourselves and each other while madness swirls around.
We appreciate every thought and every contact, and are so fortunate to have such a wide circle of friends around the world with a huge diversity of ideas and experiences.
If you can think of anyone else who can help advise us, or know someone who might be interested in following our journey please hook us up.
And once again thank you all so much for sending us contributions for our replanting programme with grass and lupin seeding coming soon and most small trees going in between February and March, but we’re getting our orders in early.
One thing we have secured is three beautiful centennial olive trees – they’ll be a highlight of the lodge and hopefully well established by the time we open.
We’ll be planting those as soon as Carlos can get them to us – along with a small olive orchard of 30 to 40 young trees.
The fields are green, the trees slowly coming back to life, and this is just a false spring...imagine what a real spring will do!