Pirates were attacking Roman ships off the coast of Mallorca, so in 123 B.C., the Roman Senate decided to take the island. With the arrival of the Romans came the arrival of Mallorcan wine, as viticulture tended to follow Roman conquest wherever it went. Mallorcan wine was favored by the nobles of Rome, as documented by Pliny the Elder’s 1st-century book Historia Natural in which he lauds Mallorcan wine as among the best in the empire. Two thousand years later, much has changed, but Mallorcans continue to make wine.

I went to the Mallorcan plains to pick grapes the old-fashioned way: by hand. Thick bunches of Cabernet Sauvignon and Montenegro grapes were trimmed at the stem and tossed into plastic milkcrates that, once full, were stacked in the back of an old Pegaso truck.

After the fruit was harvested, we paused in the vineyard to share a snack of fresh bread and sobrasada. It was washed down by glasses of the vineyard’s red wine. The sun had risen high enough to see the morning’s dew steaming into the sky. A chicken chuckled in the background.

Bellies full of unctuous meat and heads a bit buzzed from the morning wine, we leapt into the Pegaso and puttered our way back to the valley of Sóller. The truck was expertly backed into an old garage just wide enough to fit it.

In a courtyard of unpruned orange trees and bougainvillea-strewn lattices, we washed the de-stemmer machine. Once clean, it whirled and crushed the grapes into a pulp that fell into a large tub. We scooped the pulp with a five-gallon bucket and slopped it into the fermentation tanks at the back of the garage. There, the pulp ferments for half a month until relocated to two oak barrels from which last year’s vintage is removed, bottled, and enjoyed all year long. The experience culminated in a lunch of mixed paella made in the backyard outdoor kitchen and eaten in the open air.

One understands from these local experiences that there is much more to Mallorca than being Trip Advisor’s trendiest destination of recent. Agriculture, such as DIY winemaking, has deep roots in Mallorca culture that tends to get lost in the constant buzz of coastal tourism. But it is clear, once you dig a little, that there is a resilience to Mallorca’s 2,000-year-old viticulture that exists not in terms of sensational international advertising but as tradition shared by neighbors.