Dear friends,

It has been just a few months since we first opened the doors of our farm and vineyard in the rolling hills of southern Chester County, PA. Our family has grown since those early days in Chestertown and we have many new members, so it is a good moment to reflect upon who we are and why we do what we do. It is a good time to remember our mission and share the ethos of this way of life we call Casa Carmen, and given our tendencies for extravagance, it seems fitting that we look to our dear Don Quixote.

Our project, from its very beginning, has been driven by the mad vision of making something beautiful, without much regard for its difficulties. We relentlessly strive to build something that the human spirit permanently needs, though a business like ours is in many ways anachronistic in these times of ruthless efficiency and mechanization. Like Don Quixote, we fight to save what is worth saving in a world that often seems unaware of the destruction left by our modern quest for progress.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is through the most famous scene in the story of Don Quixote—the moment when our knight-errant, riding his intrepid though skeletal Rocinante (more of a greyhound than a horse), charges against the windmills, thinking that they are giants. Of course, he gets thrown to the ground, horse and all, by the enormous sails of the windmill and ends up badly battered by the patently uneven encounter. This episode is often cited as a comedic example of his madness, and that reading is not entirely wrong; as in Shakespeare, there is no comedy in Cervantes that does not hold the deepest meaning. Because what is often missed is that Don Quixote is right. The windmills, in an important sense, are giants: they are the mighty force of the machine in the advent of a new world increasingly overtaken by unlimited technological progress. And while the leading forces of the time were enthralled by the prospects of endless scientific and technological development, Don Quixote charges against them because he knows that they do not just come in peace. 

But the commentary is subtle and the book is irreducible to a singular interpretation. It is not simply an argument that the past is better than the future or about the evils of technology. For Cervantes is also a modern and sees, rightfully, the many good things about modernity—not least of which is the expansion of freedom and the capacity for self-determination. On the one hand, Don Quixote is the quintessential modern: a character seeking to create his own destiny. Yet he does so based on a “madness” born from the love of medieval books of chivalry and with the objective of recovering a medieval way of life. It is the story of a “madman” who sets out to rescue the greatness of the past in the most modern of ways. Don Quixote’s defeat against the windmills is comedic, not tragic. It is a warning with a wink. It is an example of charging and failing, but never despairing.

Like Don Quixote, at Casa Carmen, we set upon an adventure to preserve and recover a human and intimate way of life in the most modern of ways. Through a “mad” entrepreneurship and innovation, we relentlessly work to create a community that lives in the way that people have always lived: with one another, working and feasting together.

This is why we say that Casa Carmen, more than a winery, is an afternoon under the sun; that it is a voyage to the south of some distant place, an invitation and a proposal to view life not as it is, but as it should be!  Casa Carmen is an elegy for a simpler world and an ode for the one to come. It is the confession of the dreamer. It is a grand gesture with a wooden sword. This is why, with the Man of La Mancha, we may say that “Too much sanity may be madness.”

At Casa Carmen, we charge at windmills because we know they truly are giants, and we too often get thrown on the ground, horse and all. But we rise and pick up the shards of our broken lance, dust ourselves off, and charge again. And we charge in the most quixotic of ways: in speech, over a long table, with laughter like a bridge, with wine and vermouth and song. Friends, our work on this farm and our feasting together—that is our resistance. Therefore, while the world reports unprecedented levels of loneliness and division, our tables overflow, and there is always room at the inn for one more.

So let us raise a glass to all of us, wandering knights-errant through this modern world, who are willing to live a truly human life.

Salud,

Enrique