Marta Cortizas: "When you pedal you discover smells that you later find again in a glass of wine"

Girona / Canet d'AdriArrives at El Celler de Can Roca cycling, with a backpack on her back. “In my locker I always have a change of clothes for cycling and another for street wear, and a towel to be able to arrive, shower and get ready. The curtain opens: I put on the service uniform. It closes: I put on the cycling outfit”. Marta Cortizas (Culleredo, A Coruña, 1992) is a sommelier with a meteoric career. She arrived in Girona in 2021 with a single suitcase and her bicycle for a four-month stage alongside Pitu Roca. She hasn't left since: in 2024 she was recognized as the best sommelier in Catalonia and in 2025, of the entire State and the Iberian Peninsula.

All this without ever giving up cycling, in a constant pairing between pedaling and wine. More than an athlete, Cortizas pedals to observe. The bicycle is her way of reading the landscape before serving it in a glass. “The bicycle has helped me to understand the territory. Understanding the territory is understanding wine,” she reflects as we leave behind the Girona neighborhood of Taialà and head by road towards Canet d’Adri. She bought her road bike in 2018 in Galicia, when she saw that her colleague Javi Alonso – chef at El Celler de Can Roca – returned very happy when he went out cycling. And since then it has become her “daily pill”. “Cycling makes me a better person. A better sommelier, a better worker, and a better partner,” she says. Between one service and another at the restaurant, she escapes to the volcanic area near Girona, just as she used to do as a child with her parents along the coast of A Coruña: “Disconnect and connect to return to the routine”.

Discover landscapes

Cycling is also training for the senses. “When you cycle you also smell, you notice the humidity, the plants... All this you later find again in a glass –he reflects at the top of the climb–. There are Mediterranean wines from here, from Empordà, for example Grenache, that when I smell them I say, oh, this wine smells like those summer days cycling on gravel between fields of hay and dry straw”. For Cortizas, opening a wine is discovering a landscape. Just like cycling.

But cycling has also taken him a step further: to a way of understanding life. “I connected cycling with climbing mountains, therefore, also with achieving small challenges in life”. With an atypical background, as he started by studying fine arts and specializing in contemporary art, the world of wine has enveloped him without planning it. Girona too. He remembers that when he left Casa Solla to come to El Celler de Can Roca, a good friend, Luis, gave him some wine tasting notes with a dedication in which he explained that if he were a grape variety, he would be a nebbiolo. “At first it is difficult to understand him because he has a lot of character. But when you get to know him, you can’t let him go”.

Now, five years after arriving in Girona, she explains that living in Catalonia she would like to connect with sumoll, a rustic black grape variety, native to Penedès and resistant to drought. “It seems to me a simple peasant variety that has not been given much attention, since it has been the house wine, which, if adapted to the right dish, is an extraordinary variety. A black grape profile that makes a light and powerful wine that you say, wow!”.

With this reflection, Cortizas explains that she likes to think that she has also been adapting to the places where she has lived. She arrived in Girona with a road bike and quickly bought a gravel bike because she saw that it was a way to meet people and build community. “I don't understand why people in Girona take the car,” she says. She always moves around by pedaling. “Besides, Girocleta is an incredible service,” she adds about the city's public shared bike system.

A simple life

Both on the bicycle and behind a glass, Cortizas's discourse always ends up leading to the same place: a simple life. While we pedal through Canet d’Adri, where my grandmother grew up, I also think of the summers among hay fields in the Llémena valley. The landscape also takes me to rural Galicia, where Cortizas grew up. A simplicity that he has transferred to his way of understanding wine. With a plain language, suitable for all audiences, and which earns him increasing recognition. “I want everyone to feel comfortable ordering a glass of wine. That no one feels they have to be a professional to talk about it – he concludes–. I love simple people and simple wines. That's also what my profession is about”.

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