“Pachamama,” said our guide, Orlando Condori. He tilted his glass, pouring some blush-colored wine onto the parched sand.
“Si, la Pachamama!” said everyone else, doing the same.
They looked at me.
“Pachamama!” I said as I poured half my drink into the earth. I had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it, but I did it.
It was a shame. I’d been enjoying the rosé. Then again, it wasn’t the worst idea — I was lightheaded. So lightheaded that I had to sit back down.
“That’s not the wine,” said Niki Barbery-Bleyleben, a conservation ambassador for Prometa, an environmental organization focused on sustainability and community resilience. “That’s the altitude.” We were at 3,500 meters, or about 11,000 feet.
We were at a table set out on a plateau overlooking the Cordillera de Sama Biological Reserve in the southern part of Bolivia. We were in the high desert, the bright sun high overhead, with a view of — everything. From our perch we could see down the expanse of the Cordillera de Sama Mountain range. Between us and what appeared to be the ends of the earth: sparse, empty, dust-colored land, a glittering lagoon with its flamboyance of flamingos and so much sky I had to crane my neck to find its edges.
The reserve is in the province of Tarija, an agricultural region tucked into the corner of Bolivia bordering Paraguay and Argentina. Tarija, which is also the name of the city inside the province, isn’t big — only about 14,000 square miles, making it a click larger than Maryland. But its topography is amazingly varied: forests, deserts, lakes, mountains, sun, rain, snow. It has pumas, alpacas and llamas, plus three kinds of flamingos. This is Bolivian wine country — a collection of a half dozen of the best little-known wineries in the world surrounded by vast, untouched wilderness. Throw in a five-star resort and a celebrity wedding, and Tarija could be Tuscany.
With a side of magic.
“We are very spiritual in Bolivia,” said Dr. Barbery, who has a Ph. D. in social policy. “We are rooted in various Indigenous traditions that date back centuries. Andean cosmovision says you walk toward your past — it’s what is known, and therefore, lies ahead of you; your future is behind you because it is something you cannot see.”
That cosmovision explains the wine pouring. “Pachamama” is a word offering gratitude in the Quechua and Aymara languages, which originated with the Indigenous people of the Andes.
“It is a way of…
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