The Penedès winery fighting to preserve its vineyards without installing large solar farms

Espillas-Sant Sadurní de AnoiaThe road leading to Vins El Cep is winding, dirt, and surrounded by vineyards. Early in the morning, you can see the sun rise beyond the vineyards. It's a picture-perfect landscape, which is probably why it has one of the town's signposted viewpoints, called Miranda de Espiell. At the end of the road is the winery, which has a manor house as a wine tourism center (tastings and meals are offered). A few meters further on, the offices in one room, and the vats where the wines and cavas are made in another.

Vins El Cep is a four-family project founded forty-five years ago. Together with other wineries in the Espiells Terra de Vi association, they fight against anything that might disfigure the largest cultivated green vineyard garden between Barcelona and Tarragona. They won the battle against the installation of the Quart Cinturó vineyard, and now they are all working together to oppose the installation of solar panels on one of the nearby estates.

In the offices, busy with management, is Maite Esteve, who explains that it all began forty-five years ago with her father and three friends. "Since we are four families, the logo features four seeds, arranged in such a way that they add up," she explains. The four of them joined forces to enhance the value of the vineyards they owned, for whose grapes they were paid little. "There was no recognition for winegrowers, so the four wanted to take a step forward and become producers." Today, they are fully-fledged wine and cava producers (they are part of the Cava DO) and have become a benchmark for their cavas and wines. Furthermore, ownership has now passed into the hands of the daughters of three of the founding producers, who work alongside Pere Parera, one of the four original partners. "We divide the workload. Sisters Montse and Mercè Massana, Pilar Carreras, and Pere Parera take care of the vineyards and everything related to viticulture, while I manage the winery," says Maite Esteve.

We return to the topic of the uncertainty her father and his friends experienced regarding the price of grapes, which forty-five years later the winegrowers of the Penedès still experience. They no longer do, because they are winegrowers and producers, but they know that the price per kilo of harvested grapes paid this year has been very low. "It's very sad because it discourages the generations behind us," she says. However, Maite Esteve maintains that the Penedès must be a wine-producing region, because if not, the alternative is asphalt and solar panels, as is already happening in many towns in Lleida. "There are sprouts of hope, like young winegrowers who have taken the plunge into making their own wines, and that's very good, because then they are closing the circle, as we do," says Esteve. She adds: "Vinos El Cep is unique because it started with four families and we are still the same. I don't think I know of another case like ours."

The world's first biodynamic cava

At Vins El Cep, cavas account for 80% of their production, which they also export in the same percentage, while 20% remain in Catalonia. The other 20% of their production is still wines. Among their best-known examples is "the world's first biodynamic cava," according to Maite Esteve, which they bottled in 2006 under the name Claror. Within the Cava DO, they are also one of the six producers that make cavas de paraje, a category that means they make cavas from vineyards over ten years old, and with a long aging period of more than thirty-six months. "The Claror we have launched is from 2016, meaning it has been aged for eight years. It is a cava de paraje and has also been produced using biodynamic viticulture." Another of the cavas that has given prestige to Vins El Cep is Clos Gelida, made with four varieties: Macabeo, Xarel·lo, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

To continue, Esteve explains that the winery is part, as founder, of theEspiells Terra de Vino association, which encompasses thirteen wineries, twenty-five farmhouses, and a large number of winegrowers. Maite Esteve herself has been president for years, but Oriol Roig is currently in charge. He says they stopped "the Fourth Beltway, which was a danger to the green landscape of the Penedès," and points out that the territory "is the first green link after the metropolitan area." This explains the industrial and logistical pressure they are under due to their proximity to the major city.

Currently, another of the major threats that the Espiells Terra de Vi association is fighting against is solar farms, specifically the planned installation at Finca La Pedrera, on the north side of Sant Llorenç de Hortons, which also belongs to Espiells. It should be noted that the municipality of Espiells includes three municipalities: Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, Gelida, and Sant Llorenç d'Hortons. The planned project would involve the removal of 22 hectares of vineyards to make way for the solar farm. "We're not deniers; we know it's a necessary form of green energy, but we have to take the landscape into account," says Oriol Roig, who adds that the project was submitted to the Generalitat (Catalan Government) in mid-July but is still in the process of being validated. "We don't have legal recourse to oppose it; all we can do is support the Sant Llorenç de Hortons City Council, with whom we are in contact to prevent the project from going ahead," he explains.

Thus, the future isn't easy. To begin with, Esteve believes that there should be more winegrowers working as winemakers in the Penedès region, but one of the obstacles to this is the very complicated bureaucracy. "Every day we have to fill out everything we do in a digital notebook, and we even have to state the hours we've been on the tractor and the diesel we've consumed: everything." To continue, wine and alcohol consumption isn't at its best. "Wine has begun to be demonized, when historically in the Mediterranean it was always drunk. We come from a tradition in which we had lunch, dinner, and dinner with wine," says Esteve. And finally, looking ahead, there are always exciting projects to be done, like the one they're doing with red Xarel lo and Malvasia de Sitges. "Las Madones, with Malvasia de Sitges, is a tribute to the women in our families, our great-grandmothers, who worked the vineyards." Vinos El Cep has made these wines with Malvasia de Sitges, because it was the variety always planted among other vines. "They blended it with other varieties because they believed Malvasia provided aroma and freshness," says Esteve, explaining that they went to Sitges Hospital to acquire their vines to replant them to remember their history. "Now we've managed to make a dry Malvasia, aged in a demijoana, that pays homage to our great-grandmothers, whose work went unvalued," he concludes.