Through The Tunnel
At twenty-seven, Carlos Caruncho left a plane refuelling in Newfoundland with twelve dollars, a passport, and no plan beyond the certainty that he had to go.
He was raised in a wooden house in Palma Soriano, Cuba, the only boy among three sisters, taught mathematics by a father who believed "the man of the house had to be a learned one." He was sent to study in Russia, taught at a secret military school on the Isla de la Juventud, and worked alongside children evacuated from Chernobyl in a converted resort outside Havana - where a longing to leave finally became a plan.
What followed took him through a Canadian rail tunnel and into the United States on foot, then across three decades and four countries: Atlanta, Oxford, and finally California, where he restored a forty-five-year-old abandoned vineyard by hand, dry-farming it back into a small, natural wine estate whose bottles have since been reviewed by Jancis Robinson MW and Nicolas and Virginie Joly of Coul e de Serrant, and placed on the list at Commis, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Oakland.
'Through the Tunnel' is the story of that crossing, and of every crossing after it - Cuba to Russia, Russia to Canada, poverty to a Michelin-starred wine list, and grief to a vineyard that asked for nothing but patience. It is a memoir about leaving, and about what eventually comes back to you if you stop fighting the current.
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high
Can keep my own away from me."
- John Burroughs
Carlos Caruncho is a vigneron and independent viticultural advisor for the UK and Europe now based in the UK. He holds WSET qualifications under Michael Palij MW. This is his first book
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