How we came to buy a vineyard (Part 2)
One day ‘Estate Agent’ Juan showed Sandy some land just outside Felanitx, she was so taken by this place that she took me to see it. We passed between an old stone farmhouse and a Quixotic windmill tower devoid of sails. We continued for a kilometre along a rough track. The land consisted of two distinct parts. Standing at the midpoint in the track looking north, the land to the west had a solitary fig tree on rough ground of sagebrush, course grass and wild fennel leading to a wood of pine and Mediterranean oak. The land to the east contained three thousand six hundred grapevines in sixty rows running north to south. The vines were in two sections divided by a strip of land planted with apricot, algarroba and almond trees. The western section of grapes was in two levels separated by a terrace wall and a line of oak, wild olive and algarroba trees. Amidst the vines in the lower part was an old, round Roman stone well. The track continued up to the mountain monastery of San Salvador that dominated the area, and off to the south was the Castillo de Santueri atop a sheer white-faced cliff. The whole place was enchanting.
The land had two separate escrituras (deeds), each escritura recorded a land area of 19,000 sq mtrs which was larger than the 15,000 sq mtrs required for planning permission. It would, therefore, be possible to build two houses. Because of the sudden influx of new foreign buyers, there was a rumour that the Ajumtamento might increase the area required to build from 15 to 28,000 sq mtrs. If that happened, it would still be possible to build a house. You couldn’t subdivide a large piece of land to build more houses, but you were allowed to join smaller pieces together to make up enough land to build one house. Sandy decided she would sell the land and share the commission with Juan.
The Last Valley was off the beaten track with beautiful pastoral views. It had easy access to the coast being only ten minutes drive to Porto Colom. However, buyers were more interested in land with sea views.
Then along came Jörg and Bettina from Hamburg, for whom Sandy had earlier found some land overlooking the sea near Porto Colom on which they were building a house. Now, they wanted a piece of land as an investment. Bettina was a blond lady into spirituality and macrobiotics. Jörg was less spiritual, into San Miguel beer and FC St Pauli, his father had been a U-Boat commander in the war. Superficially he was arrogant, all things German were superior, and their football team was the best in the world, which in truth it probably was at the time. However, all this was a wind-up, he respected the British, and despite the bluff, I think he was something of an Anglophile. A lot of this repartee was about the master race and us lot across the North Sea. Jörg and I became great friends, and I came to address him as ‘Mein Herr Oberstleutnant Sturmbannführer’. Bettina and Sandy found all this banter spiritually unhealthy, but like two schoolboys we couldn’t be controlled.
Jörg taught Advertising and Marketing at university but was also a part-time correspondent for a German sports paper. Once, when there was a big Europen football thing hosted in Manchester, Jörg covered the event. Sandy and I got nightly calls from Jörg wanting interpretations of tabloid headlines. What was meant by ‘Hunderful’ and ‘Tanks for the memories’? He wanted to incorporate the British humour into his text for his German readers’ enjoyment. This link to Mallorca was instrumental in preventing a German walkout following the unrelenting bombardment by a particularly perverse form of British nationalism. Jörg recognised the psychological warfare, hit the typewriter and saved the day. We wondered if we were now collaborators or just good Europeans.
Sandy went to the owner of the Last Valley to negotiate a price. The area was owned by a lady named Juana, but negotiations were done through her husband Gabriel, a retired vet and an ex-mayor of Felanitx. Gabriel had a dairy farm and stables near the village of Son Mesquida. His hobby was breading horses for trotting racing.
In Mallorca, negotiations can be a drawn-out affair involving more than just money. It is not unknown for a seller to pull out of a sale because they don’t like the attitude of the buyer.
With me in tow, Sandy representing the purchaser was invited to Gabriel’s farm for vetting by the vet. We got on well and assured him the buyers were good people, and he reduced the price. Jörg and Bettina were unsure, but Gabriel was not prepared to reduce the price further, it was a good deal. Jörg and Bettina couldn’t make a decision, so to make it easier for them, Sandy and I said we might be able to buy one of the pieces of land.
First, we had to raise the money, but neither of us had a regular job. This would require a serious look at our finances that were anything but predictable. Each year, we had a small but fairly reliable income from renting our converted donkey stable. Sandy usually sold a few properties and received a commission. I made some money troubleshooting repairing pools, pumps, generators, and electrics and electronics on boats. We also rented out old farmhouses to German and English tourists, that holiday business was just starting in Mallorca. The house owners trusted us, and we had little competition.
So, that was the state of our financial empire at the time, plus we had a little rainy day money. With all this, we had enough to buy one plot with a little over. We faxed Jörg and Bettina in Germany with our proposal and went back to Gabriel to explain the situation. Gabriel dropped the price once more and gave us three days to make a decision before it went up again.
Jörg and Bettina still wouldn’t commit, it looked like we would lose a great opportunity. We went over our figures again, it was a big risk, but if we were careful, we could buy both plots without getting into debt. We took a gamble.
We told Gabriel we would buy both plots ourselves. He said for tax reasons, he would prefer an initial payment followed by equal amounts over three years, this significantly reduced our risk. Juan said we could renegotiate the price without agent’s fees if we paid his commission direct. Without the agent’s fees, Gabriel dropped the price one last time. As Sandy was joint agent, we only had to pay half the commission to Juan, who offered to defer his fee until we felt secure enough to pay it. We took his offer and paid him a year later.
There was one last detail to resolve. There is a term in Spain called ‘usofruto’ which refers to the right of someone to use another person’s property. In the case of the Last Valley, a farmer called Francisco tended the land and took the produce. We could have kept this arrangement but were advised the contract would be more straightforward with usofruto removed.
Gabriel, Francisco and his wife Francisca, Sandy and I met one morning on the land to discuss the matter of compensation. I was worried that Francisco’s severance would be costly. It turned out that Francisco had planted the vines thirty-eight years earlier, the year he got married, now he felt he was too old to continue working the vines. We came to an amicable agreement. Francisco said he would look after the vines and take the grapes, apricots, almonds and algarroba as payment for one more year on an informal basis until we got ourselves organised.
With all these details sorted out, on a sunny morning on the Second of November 1994, we met with Gabriel and his wife Juana in the Notario’s office just off the Palm Square in Felanitx. We paid over our money and signed the contract that gave us ownership of the vineyard, scrubland and wood under the monastery of San Salvador. The official name for the area was Son Bennassar which is Arabic. This meant the area had been farmed as far back as the Moorish occupation of Mallorca, and even earlier by the Romans.
And that’s how we came to buy a vineyard.