THE LOST CHAMPAGNE OF OSEIRA. A monastic industry between the Ribeiro region, the Republic and the post-war period (1930–1963)

 

Carlos Pérez Blanco https://es.linkedin.com/in/carlosperezblanco ·

 

When the Cistercian monks returned to Oseira in October 1929, the monastery had stood empty for almost a century. The secularisation of 1835 had left it without a community, and what the State had not taken away, time had gradually eroded. The initiative for the restoration came from the Bishop of Ourense, Florencio Cerviño, and the foundation was established by the French abbey of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, with a few monks from San Isidro de Dueñas. No public funds were involved. The community supported itself through its own enterprises, as was the custom in French Trappist monasteries: electricity, farming, cheese and butter, chocolate, sacramental wine, an aperitif and, from very early on, champagne. This work reconstructs the history of that champagne based on the Galician press of the time, the writings of Friar Damián Yáñez Neira and other sources.

 

A flying start

On 14 February 1931, the monks treated José Calvo Sotelo to their ‘already famous champagne’. Four months later, in June, Policarpo Seisdedos described in the *Revista del Auto-Aero Club de Galicia* a factory that had ‘just been set up’, where ‘the white wines from Ribero’ were being turned into sparkling wine. These two accounts fit together if production began on a small scale in 1930, for the monastery and its visitors, and if a facility was set up for commercial sales in the spring of 1931. There was no tradition of sparkling wine in the region, and the monastery had no vineyards in Oseira: it purchased its wine from the Ribeiro, as it had done for centuries through its priories. The craft must have been brought over by the monks. A French lay brother fitted out the cellar in 1930, and an advertisement from 1935 boasted of ‘French production experts’. The sparkling wines documented in *Neiges* date from after 1949, so it is most likely that the know-how came from a specific monk, whose name remains unknown.

 

A brand with all its components

Between 1932 and 1935, Osera Champagne was a fully-fledged commercial product. It was served at the opening of the dining rooms at the Hotel La Bilbaína and in the hall of the Liceo Recreo Orensano, and the monastery published at least sixty advertisements in five newspapers: *Galicia* and *La Región* in Ourense, *El Compostelano* in Santiago, *Vida Gallega* and *El Ideal Gallego*. The campaign reached its peak in May 1933, with eighteen advertisements in a single month. There were outlets in Ourense, Santiago and A Coruña, with carriage-paid delivery by rail and two grades available – ‘blue label’ and ‘white label’ – priced at 93 and 73 pesetas per case respectively during the 1935 Christmas season. The only illustrated advert, from January 1933, features two bears embracing a bottle, a reference to ‘Ursaria’, the ‘land of bears’ from which the place takes its name. The surviving labels, one of which was printed in Gijón and bears the stamp ‘Timbre a metálico’, confirm the care taken with the presentation. In the autumn of 1935, the champagne was served at the closing banquet of the Galician-Portuguese Medical Conference and at the lunch hosted by the Civil Guard in Ourense.

 

War and the post-war period

With the outbreak of war, advertising disappeared, but the product remained. It was served at the field hospital in Betanzos at Christmas 1936; three men from Ferrol left crates for Franco at Salamandra in February 1937; and a prisoner at the monastery – which had been turned into a detention centre – recalled the ‘taste of champagne’ on Christmas Eve. The claim that it supplied Franco’s air force stems from a 1960 guide and is not documented; the suggestion that it flourished due to the absence of Catalan champagne is plausible, but there are no figures to back it up. In the post-war period, the brand endured: it appears in the programme for the Corpus Christi celebrations in 1943, at the reformatory’s festival in 1944 and in a 1953 inventory, valued at 13 pesetas compared to 15 for Codorníu. In September 1955, during Franco’s visit, the prior proposed a toast with a champagne that the monks ‘currently produce’.

 

The End

The crisis came in the years that followed. In 1959, the Holy See placed the monastery under an apostolic administrator; in 1960, the patronage passed from Neiges to Dueñas; and in April 1963, Cuco Cerecedo reported in *El Pueblo Gallego* that the champagne-making equipment had already been removed by lorry and that ten monks remained, awaiting the order to leave. Champagne production ceased between 1955 and 1963. The community survived; the monastery officially reopened in 1964 and regained its status as an abbey in 1977, but the champagne never returned. The liqueur Eucaliptine, which the monastery has been producing since 1969, is not a continuation of the old Aperitivo Osera. It shares the same purpose – a drink for the sick and convalescents – but not the recipe.

 

One of the first Galician champagnes

Following an unbranded predecessor in Petín (1888), the Grano Champán Galicia from La Ramallosa (circa 1920–1925) and the Grano Champagne Gulías from Ribeiro (from 1921), the one from Oseira was the third branded Galician champagne. It was the longest-lasting of the three, lasting some twenty-five years; the only one produced by a religious community; and, during the war and the post-war period, probably the only Galician sparkling wine on the market. It is also, by far, the best documented. Even so, none of the histories of Galician sparkling wine published to date mention it.

 

Questions remain unanswered: who oversaw the production, which method and which grapes were used, how much was produced, and in exactly which year production ceased.