An ancestral wine with a mother's love

Marta Clot worked as a sommelier at the Wine Palace chain of wine stores and there she noticed that customers were always asking her the same questions. Questions about pairings, about designations of origin or about types of grapes. Answering these questions gave her the idea of creating "content" about wine for "non-experts". It started with a name, Wine and company, which later changed to that of The one of the wines, because Wine and company, she tells me, was hard to say and remember. Today she is a well-known and followed creator of content in Catalan, also in Spanish, on Instagram and TikTok. Her videos (I don't know if they are called videos, I'm old-fashioned), to use the classic word, are casual and addressed, one-on-one, with informal, non-academic details, seeking humor, to a non-expert and surely young audience, but not only. In the world of wine, in short, being and above all being casual is already a value. There are many ways to communicate, of course, and I would say that they all add up. Because the only thing necessary is that the wine is on the tables and that the farmers (without farmers there is no wine) can earn a living.

Many sommeliers end up making their own wine, and some have appeared on these pages. Marta has also done so. made, and the second (the 300 bottles of the first one were quickly finished) is the one we have in the glass today. The italics of the verb do It is because it has been accompanied by a winery that we greatly admire (and that has also appeared on these pages): Alta Alella. With Alta Alella they have created today's ancestral wine. It is called AA, precisely, for reasons of initials.

An ancestral wine, unlike a sparkling wine made with the traditional method, undergoes a single fermentation, which begins in the tank or in the cask and ends in the bottle, where the magic bubbles will form. The oldest sparkling wine in the world is ancestral, our ancestors have always made ancestral wines and I never tire of repeating that the monk Dom Pérignon made an ancestral wine by accident, when –we believe the legend– he noticed that the cork of a bottle was flying out, he took a sip of the liquid that spilled: he swallowed the liquid that spilled!

Marta's ancestry is pink raisin (a variety to discover and love, from the DO Alella) and she herself says (who better to communicate her wine) that it is "unfiltered and bold" and a bit of pinot noir. This "unfiltered" is literal, they have not filtered it, so the stems can be seen at the bottom of the bottle. And on the same bottle you will find a recommendation: gently swirl it so that these stems mix with the wine and "give it more volume and texture." In other words, they make a virtue of cloudiness. Hence, we speak, then, of love of mother. That's why it's "daring," and also because you'll see that it's covered with a cap, as if it were beer. It's a statement of intent: it's looking for informality. You'll find fruit, but from the forest, like raspberries or currants. Maybe you'll find pomegranate and even grapefruit. If you try it, you'll want more.

Many of Marta's followers, young or not, who surely think that a full-bodied black doesn't suit them, will instead enjoy her ancestral (but there aren't enough bottles for all the followers she has!). Marta's ancestral, clearly, is a statement of intent. It's her. She has nerve, freshness, fun and, as we've said, no filter.

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