Enric inherited a tiny parcel of Xarel-lo planted in 1945 called Vinya dels Taus from his grandfather in the early 2000’s. At the time he was a successful sommelier and wine educator in Barcelona, but following the recovery of his grandfather’s vineyard, Enric set out to prove that still Xarel-lo from Catalonia has the potential to sit alongside the world’s finest white wines. In the vineyards, everything has meaning, even doing nothing. The ground remains unturned. The vines are bush trained, pruned with precision; Xarel·lo requires careful attention. The vineyard is worked only when it is appropriate, using sustainable agricultural techniques and a carefully attuned eye. Everything points to a specific way of doing things: massal selection that eschews aesthetic considerations, a graft on a forgotten rootstock, a pile of small stones that supports the branches of an eighty-year-old vine, the vegetation that grows spontaneously between the rows of vines. All vineyards are worked in the same way, because that is the only way for Enric.
In the winery, the wines spontaneously ferment in wooden or cement containers with wild yeasts and without any adjustment to the musts. They are left alone to stabilize and are not clarified. Wine spends more time in the cellar than the grapes spend on the vine, and it is therefore left quietly to rest. As Enric sees it, “Wine is affected by the present and the past, the characteristics of the terroir, the work carried out by those who have waited a whole year for the harvest. But above all, wine offers a way of seeing the world. Making wine is a form of creation that finds a kind of honest language in austerity. This is a truly creative act: looking at the world in a way that is so deep it allows you to distill the truth, to strip away all that is not essential to the process and trust in the authenticity of that which remains, that which needs no explanation.”
- Improvisació – single vineyard Xarel-lo
- Espenyalluchs – single plot of Xarel-lo
- Nun – single vineyard Xarel-lo