From Tivissa on the wine podium

"I wanted to wake up at home and pick up my daughter. After the verdict, I left. We celebrated later in Sanlúcar de Barrameda and in Puerto de Santa María, at Tohqa." Eloi Cedó, an agricultural engineer and oenologist, is one of the most clairvoyant voices of the natural wine movement. Born in Tivissa, in 2023 he won the Vila Viniteca couples tasting competition in Madrid with sommelier Nacho Martínez. This year they are on the waiting list; in three minutes the tickets for the 17th edition, which is held in March, sold out. 135 competing couples and 50,000 euros of financial prize money between winners and finalists. Cedó allocated the money to "the treasury shake-up that year and the income tax return the next. To plug holes and live." He is sincere. He is careful with the language. He comes from a humble family in the Ribera de Ebro: "There is no romanticism in my dedication to wine, but rather a vineyard landscape and an agricultural union in decline."

"Nacho and I don't train together. We live in Barcelona and Mallorca and when we see each other we dedicate ourselves to enjoying ourselves rather than blindly tasting. We have participated in the competition five times and the most important thing is meta-thinking. The first intuition counts, the dialogue and believing more in the opinion of the other than in the opinion." He does not deny that the setting imposes, especially when the Lonja de Barcelona welcomes them. "I know that I am going to try wines that I am going to like a lot, but they are not stylistically the ones that satisfy me," he warns in reference to the competition. Varied palates coexist. He qualifies his own: "I like to drink everything while being told the truth. I ask for transparency in wine. I want bottles that are discursively coherent. I am filled with wines from regions with parameters that I do not have, such as Jura, Loire and many from Italy." Forged in harvests in the New and Old World and in the two hemispheres, his current graft is in the Islands. "The world of wine is holistic, I have had to unlearn many things over the years. Academia is necessary and I will never give it up, but each factor that intervenes in the production process can be read from a different prism." He makes frank wines, without makeup, that clearly show the vintage. "And our viability depends on that. I know that I will do things that I have never done, yet. I will continue in the radicality of the production, but investigating new paths." Today, he does it from the Cati Ribot winery nursery, in Santa Margalida, where he shares talent and trust with five other producers. "They love you for who you are and not for what you do," he says. But he also praises the learning of Òscar Navas, Laureano Serres and Joan Anguera: "They are winegrowers who have changed my life and blow my mind."