Xavi Nolla: "In Catalan restaurants, the wines sold are Rioja and Riberas del Duero."

BarcelonaI interviewed Pantea Group wine consultant Xavi Nolla on a Wednesday afternoon, two hours before the sparkling wine tasting he will co-lead at the Público restaurant in Barcelona (Enric Granados, 30). He is a sommelier and also makes wines from various denominations of origin, such as Terra Alta, DOQ Priorat, Alella, Empordà, and Roussillon. Since he first launched his Vinos de la Memoria (Memory Wines), as he named them in 2018, they have become benchmarks in a winemaking style that engages with the winemaking practiced in Spain before the 1970s. They are fresh, saline, mineral wines in which the variety with which they are made is clearly evident. Above all, the story behind the wines stood out, wines dedicated to his grandfather, who fought on the Republican front in the Battle of the Ebro, was imprisoned in two concentration camps, and was finally able to resume his life. "If it hadn't been like that, I wouldn't be here," says Nolla.

The day I came to dinner at the Público restaurant, I was surprised by the demijoana with rancio wine, which the waiters told me had been aged since 1931. I ordered a glass of dessert. I really liked it.

— When we were preparing the restaurant's wine list, I suggested they have it because I had located it in the winery in Espolla (DO Empordà). I took part of the 1931 solera and other years as well. We have it on the bar, and of all the Pantea Group restaurants I advise, Público is the only one that has it. Rancid wine is part of our country's heritage, cultural and winemaking history, and of course it means the winery has invested time. You can't make rancid wine overnight, and that's precisely why it's not credible that a bottle of rancid wine is on the market for two euros. For that price, it can only have been manipulated or disguised. It could also be that the winery had too many liters and had them left over, but in general, rancid wine means time, and time has a price.

At Público, diners can purchase the bottle at store prices.

— Yes, when we were planning the restaurant, we decided that wine should be its hallmark. The owners wanted a hybrid project between a grocery store, a wine bar, and a restaurant, and I think we've achieved that with the different areas in the restaurant. At the entrance, there's a wine bar. You can have a glass of wine with cheese whenever you want. If you go further in, before reaching the dining room, there's the shop, with shelves full of wine bottles. And finally, at the back, the dining room, with tables to share, small tables, and the bar. In both the restaurant and the grocery area, we sell bottles at store prices. In the restaurant, it's only eight euros more, because that's the cost of serving them in Riedel glasses and keeping them at the right temperature. We have wines that we sell for thirty euros, and in other restaurants they're eighty or one hundred.

I preferred to order glasses to try different wines. The wine list on my iPad, categorized by the twelve Catalan appellations of origin, helped me a lot when choosing.

— Sixty percent of our selection is Catalan wines. 20% is from the rest of Spain, and the other 20% is from key wines from European countries. So we don't leave Europe. To continue, 40% of the wines on the menu can be enjoyed by the glass, and the highest price is fourteen euros. There are some fixed wines that are always served by the glass, but we're constantly opening new ones. The idea is that we always have wines by the glass that are a discovery, so that the experience with the dishes, which change depending on the fish of the day, is complete.

Changing the subject. You're a sommelier, but you make wines. Do you consider yourself a winemaker?

— No, no. I prefer to use the English expression. winemaker, which has a broader meaning, and does not go into as much detail as the word oenologistThe thing is, I'm making wine without being a winemaker, or owning vineyards or a winery, but as a sommelier, I know all the winemaking processes.

When you decide to make wine, you choose a personal story.

— It was an emotional decision, yes. A year before I made the five bottles of wine, in 2017, if someone had asked me if I ever wanted to make wine, I would have answered emphatically no, but there was a turning point that made me change: I toured the areas my grandfather had walked on during the Civil War, which were planted with vineyards. I sought out the owners, located them, and made deals to buy a portion of the grapes to make my wines. The vineyards are still not mine, nor have I rented them; I just buy a portion of the grapes, and I decide when to harvest them. I remember that in the early years, I harvested earlier than they were used to, and they looked at me strangely. There's a tradition of letting the grapes overripe to give the wine a higher alcohol content, but that was exactly what I didn't want. I think I established my own style here.

Tell me more about your own style, which you've named Wines of Memory.

— I base my wines on what was produced in our country before the 1970s, when there was no French influence, when French oak hadn't been established, and winemaking wasn't dominated by Bordeaux wines and its Cabernet Sauvignon. This trend led to the uprooting of our traditional varieties, such as Xarel lo, because it was low-yielding, but above all because it wasn't fashionable. So my wines are the ones you could find in farmhouses in the 1970s in the Catalan Country. I used a 650-liter Catalan chestnut barrel. I also wanted to recover the expression of brisado wines for the whites, which means the must has fermented with the skins. This is what the trends have dubbed " orange wineBut at the neighborhood winery, there had always been some, because it had always been made at our house. When we went to the winery, the Gandesa whites that were sixteen or seventeen percent had been made from the grape skins.

Since the wines are dedicated to your grandfather, tell me about him, okay?

— His name was Agustín Pérez, from Almería. He came to Barcelona looking for work and worked as a handyman at the Venetian Towers in Plaça d'Espanya. When everything was going well for him, the war came, and there was a moment when the Republican front had run out of troops, and they sent very young people and very old people, and this is where he appears, although he had no political interest. Since he had worked as a miner in Almería, they assigned him to build trenches, and that's what saved his life, because his division, the 27th, was annihilated. Incidentally, his division was known as La Bruixa, and that's why the first wine I made is called, precisely, La Bruixa.

Did Grandpa manage to get back home?

— Yes, but, for fear of repression, he went into exile and was imprisoned in Argelers. He was there for five months. And then, in Barcelona, they interned him again in a concentration camp, in Horta. And he pulled through. He was able to continue with his life, had two children, and died when I was three. My great-aunt was the one who had the most memories, and she's the one who told me about my grandfather.

Have you considered making alcohol-free wines?

— No, I won't. I'm reluctant because dealcoholizing a wine means chemistry and intervention. If we don't want to drink wine with alcohol, we order must, but we don't force things, because that would mean the wine in question will have been flavored with external elements. However, as a wine list consultant, I have included it because customers ask for it. And I really see the market moving toward wines with a lower alcohol content. In the Priorat DOC, we'll see how wines will be taken outside the DOC so that they can be made with a lower alcohol content than the regulations allow.

Are Catalan wines selling more than ever?

— No. We have good sales figures for Catalan wines, but in restaurants the wines sold are Riojas and Riberas del Duero, which are from Valladolid, a place where Catalans hate it. Go into any restaurant and look at the bottles on the tables. I still remember one Onze de Setembre, the year of one of the big demonstrations, when I noticed the wines being drunk at the restaurant tables, and they were all Spanish. I wanted to say to them, "What are you doing?"

Are we open-minded enough to taste wines from other designations of origin in the country?

— I don't know what to tell you. This doesn't happen anywhere else, not in the Basque Country, nor in Galicia, where the wines ordered in restaurants are those made there. However, we opt for wines not made in-house. With all this, I'm referring to the restaurant industry, a sector in which there are no data or statistics to certify this, because the only ones we have are those on sales in stores and supermarkets, and these do allow for big headlines to say that Catalan wine sells. But the day the study is complete, we'll understand that's not the case, that we're fascinated by wines from abroad and not our own. It doesn't make sense.