A Quiet Inheritance
There are places where identity isn’t chosen.
It’s repeated. Season after season. Generation after generation, until it becomes who you are.
For Manuel Choqque, that inheritance began in the soil of Peru’s Sacred Valley.
“My name is Manuel Choqque. I am the 5th generation of potato farmers in the Choqque family.”
I spent the better part of a day with Manuel walking his farm above Peru’s Sacred Valley. We filmed, tasted wine made from oca, and talked through the path that brought him here.
Agriculture in the Andes deals in cycles.
Plant. Harvest. Rest. Repeat.
I learned that Manuel’s entire life has been connected to potatoes.
“I remember that my first toys were potatoes. So potatoes are in my genes. It’s part of my genetics, part of my culture, of my tradition.”
The Misunderstood Crop
The potato is one of the most consumed foods on the planet.
And one of the most reduced.
In most places, it’s a side dish. Cheap calories.
For Manuel, it’s something else.
Not a commodity, but his personal story.
Knowledge stored in seeds, soil, and cultural history.
“What we are doing now is to recover and transmit all that culture we have inherited from our ancestors. Many years of research have gone into this, and, well, now we have a super potato full of antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals. We want the potato to be a superfood.”
The Andes didn’t need to rediscover the potato.
But I think the rest of the world might just need a reminder.
Breaking the Narrative
For Manuel, the biggest challenge isn’t the crop.
It’s perception.
“It’s a very serious social problem at the Latin American level. Many young people growing up think that living in the countryside means poverty, ignorance, and no quality of life. And now they’re starting to migrate to the city, that’s a problem.
What we want is to show that’s not true. You can live well. You can do research. You can build a business. You can have a quality of life.
We want people to come back…home.”
Wine Tasting at Casa Bodega Oxalis
At Manuel’s research lab, farm, and tasting center, the show begins with oca.
An Andean tuber. Bright, acidic, complex, and largely unknown outside this region.
For Manuel, that absence is the opportunity.
He’s taken something overlooked and reframed it in a different context, transforming it into a fermented drink that tastes enough like wine to confuse the room, now served at some of the world’s greatest restaurants, like MIL by Virgilio Martínez.
Guests come here on Dirt Under Fingernails, our private farm tasting with Manuel.
Why This Matters
Dirt Under Fingernails, the private farm tasting we send guests to, sits inside the Nicholas Gill x WhereNext Collection because of people like Manuel.
He’s not just a supplier.
He’s an elite farmer, the Michael Jordan of potatoes and tubers.
Manuel didn’t set out to reinvent anything.
He stayed.
He paid attention.
And he chose to see value in what was already his.
Because in a world that celebrates “going,” sometimes the boldest move is to “remain.”
And build something that makes the world come to you.
#FeelSomething
