Olívia Bayés: "In the future, we will drink less wine, but what we do drink will be of quality"

PorreraI arrive in Porrera on a Friday afternoon with a cloudy sky that adds even more beauty to the population of houses nestled on both sides of the Cortiella river. I go up the road towards Cornudella del Montsant, to take a detour that indicates the name of the Marco Abella winery on a sign. From the very doors of the winery, the Priorat unfolds in its essence: terraced vineyards between heaven and earth. A landscape so beloved and so wild at the same time, qualities that are not separated but united. I interview Olivia Bayés (Vic, 1972) in the winery, in front of a window from which you can see the vineyards they cultivate. Next to the window there is a large painting by the deceased painter Josep Guinovart, a friend of David Marco's family, Olivia's partner. The Marco Abella winery (named after David's grandfather) celebrates this year twenty years of making wines in the Priorat qualified designation of origin.

The painting by Josep Guinovart in this large room of the winery is impressive.

— We thought it was the ideal place to put it. Guinovart was a friend of David's family, and when we had to make labels for the first wines we made, we thought about asking him to make one for us. One day he called us and told us to come to his studio in Castelldefels. He showed us eight or nine, and told us that they were all for us, that we should use the ones we liked.

How did it all start?

— David's grandfather was born in Porrera, his name was David Marco Abella, and he had three hectares of vineyards. With the phylloxera, his grandfather's father, his great-grandfather, decided to go to Barcelona, ​​​​because the vineyard was lost, and he set out on the adventure of looking for a new job far from the land. They always lived in Raval, his grandfather became a tailor, and in the summer they returned to Porrera. That's how David, in the 70s and 80s, when he was very young, began to come to Porrera.

What was Porrera like in the 70s?

— David remembers the darkness of the houses at night, and that he would call his parents from a switchboard in Porrera. The fact is that he spent his childhood coming and going from Porrera. Neither of us studied oenology. I studied law, and David worked as a telecommunications engineer.

Then in the 90s there were changes in Porrera and throughout the Priorat.

— Yes, David continued to come with his parents in the summers, and they witnessed the replanting of vineyards, the opening of wineries, and the beginnings of a feverish activity. And so, one day, I remember it was in 1999, when we were already together, he suggested that I replant vineyards on the three hectares that the family kept in Porrera. The anecdote is that we were planting vineyards while he and I were just getting to know each other.

Was it clear to you that you wanted to make wine?

— No, no, we wanted to sell the grapes. That was our first thought, because we both kept our jobs. We didn't want to make wine, and planting vineyards and obtaining grapes is a long-term project, so we just kept going. But as the vineyard grew, we started doing wine tastings, we went to fairs, and we realized that we liked that world. And when the day came that we had to sell the grapes we harvested in 2004, then we asked ourselves: why don't we try to make our own wine? And we took the plunge. In 2004 we did some winemaking; it was our pilot year, and we did it in a rented space in Gratallops.

In 2005, he dedicated himself with confidence.

— It is the year that counts, yes. From all the grapes we harvested, we produced four thousand bottles. And what we did not think would happen happened: we realized that combining our jobs with winemaking was incompatible. We realized this while we were tasting the Clos Abella 2004, the pilot wine, made with Carignan, Grenache and a little Cabernet Sauvignon, and we thought it had turned out very well.

Since then, 2005, until now, twenty years later, what has happened at the Marco Abella winery? How many hectares do you cultivate now?

— Forty-one hectares, of which only one and a half hectares are Cabernet Sauvignon. We have made a great leap forward. We have winemakers like Roger Vernet, who is from Priorat and knows the territory well, and we also have an advisor who lives in San Francisco.

Please explain to me how you apply your training, in areas other than oenology, to making your wines.

— From the first moment we thought about making wines, and not selling the grapes, we told ourselves that we had to control everything. Each plot, depending on the height, orientation and variety, was vinified separately. The first year we managed to carry out seventy different vinifications. It is just as we thought it should be done, so that the grape would maintain its character.

The first wine he made was a red, the Clos Abella 2004, but what about the whites?

— We wanted to make them the following year, in 2005, and also in 2006, but we didn't like it, and we weren't convinced until the 2007 vintage came along. So, yes, we made white in 2007, 2008 and 2009. And still.

And it's not the first white thing he's done.

— No, in 2020 we made a second one. We know that Priorat is a land of blacks, and the production figures indicate this, but we like the whites and they are increasingly finding their place. In addition, Priorat whites are very complex, mineral, they pair well with dishes and can last a long time in the bottle. Our whites have the soul of a red wine, which means that they have body, complexity, and can last a long time in the bottle, meaning that they are not whites that should be drunk straight away. We like to emphasise this because we come from a tradition of whites that people associated with drinking them cold, almost frozen, in front of the beach. White wines are no longer like that: now if we tasted them blindly we would not be able to distinguish a white from a red. That is why white wines can be drunk with meat and game dishes. We are done with having to pair meat dishes with red wines.

For years, the Parker Guide has been rewarding wines with a lot of wood.

— We have always gone against the grain. We do use wood, because Priorat wines need wood to be tamed, but always in a shorter time. We have used wood as a complement to refine the wine, whereas Parker for years liked wood, which sometimes masks the personality of the territory. In addition, these wines often arrived in the barrel overripe, which is the opposite of what we do. We have experimented with concrete, amphora, demijohns and granite. In fact, we make a wine that is one hundred percent made from granite. And this is because we have vineyards on seven peaks in Porrera, we harvest later than in other towns in Priorat, such as Gratallops, so our wines are fresher.

Being tall must also make everything more difficult.

— Yes, of course, because travelling by tractor is very complicated. But the fact is that with our first wine, Clos Abella 2004, many people told us that it didn't seem like a wine made in Priorat, because the wine had good acidity and freshness, and we achieved that above all in the vineyard.

Perhaps the fact that you do not come from the world of oenology led you to do it differently.

— Sure. We are from Porrera, but we have come to wine in different ways. Basically, we are driven by what we like, what we enjoy, and that means fresh wines, with good acidity, elegant. These three principles have been the focus from the beginning. We maintain the identity and quality but with different wines. By the way, the prescribers of the Parker guide have never come to our winery.

But perhaps now if Luis Gutiérrez, who writes about the wines of the State for the North American guide, came, he would like his wines a lot, because the trends in the world of wine have changed a lot. The oak has been left behind.

— One day or another we will get in touch, because we know that you have made this change. At the moment, we have not. We know that scores and awards give you visibility, and we ourselves had a time when we said that we did not want to enter any competitions because we did not want anyone to examine us, but then we changed our minds. Now, our focus is on blind wine competitions, not on uncorked wine like Parker does. In any case, that is not our front; we sell our wine to clients and importers who like it.

What percentage of wine remains in the State?

— Twenty percent; the rest, we export. During the pandemic, the wine we brought here increased by ten percent, but now we are at 20-80.

The prices of their wines vary widely, ranging from 17 to 300 euros.

— 17 euros is the price of the Loidana, while El Perer costs 300, yes. We make Perer with grapes from old vines, which only gives us three hundred bottles. We vinify separately, as always, and we taste all the casks blind. El Perer 2024 is a single-varietal Carignan, and has great depth and minerality. It is a wine that makes you vibrate.

Are these vines that I see through the window, up there, yours?

— It is Terra Cuques, yes, it is the oldest vineyard in Priorat; we believe there is no other one older. It is made of Carignan and some Grenache, and the best part of the story is that it belonged to a part of David's family who sold it to him. In 2018 the family bought it back but without knowing that it was the oldest vineyard in Priorat.

How old can this vineyard be?

— One hundred and twenty-five years. Or maybe more.

Do you think he had to argue a lot about why he made wine during these twenty years?

— We had to explain a lot that we were from Barcelona, ​​but that David's family was from Porrera, and that he had been coming here since the 70s. Yes, we had to do that.

Finally, what future do you foresee for Priorat?

— A splendid future. We have a long way to go with wine, because, compared to France, we are just starting. We also believe that the world of wine can change; in fact, we have signs that it indicates this, such as the trend of non-alcoholic wines, but, nevertheless, wine is not going to disappear. In the future, we will drink less wine but what we drink will be of quality. Wine is culture, and Priorat is highly valued in the world. When you travel selling wine, and we can say this because we sell to more than twenty-five countries, the world knows what Catalonia is because of Priorat. We can assure this because we constantly check it.