A wine from the Mediterranean, from the Via Augusta, from a grandmother who wants to farm and from a grandson who says there's no way he'll even mention it.

Many people, like this woman, are devoted to Chardonnay, this French variety. The Via Augusta. If you visit the winery, you can press it and they make a vinegar that is totally crazy.

"You're not wrong with this thing about saving this bottle you're talking about," Albert Roig tells me, who has worked at the winery since he was eighteen. "We had olive trees, carob trees, and vineyards. I studied compulsory secondary education, but I was one of those students... They didn't really know what to do with me. Until I discovered the studies at the Espiells school." He pauses, and unintentionally changes the tense. They're offering me an internship." When he tells me I'm not on the wrong track, I know what he means. This Chardonnay was one of the first in Spain to be "aged for years." And they discovered that in two or three years in the bottle, all the tropical fruit in the Chardonnay, the pineapple in the Polish, the banana... evolved. "He's a big fan," he tells me. "It's the perfect white wine that anyone who wants tropical fruit will drink now, and anyone who wants this other thing will put away. And then they'll find the pastry from their village bakery."

I smile as I listen, because he's talking about his grandmother. "My "Grandmother, plowing? Why does she tell me: "No, child, pull out all the grass, everything must be clean and spotless." And I say to him: "Grandmother, before we looked for more kilos." And every year is an adventure... Just today, her tractor broke down because they found a rock.

This Avgustus Chardonnay is a 2023. You can cellar it, drink it, or buy it in pairs and—if you're patient, which I don't—try one, write down what you thought, and try the other in a few years. Who knows where we'll be, but hopefully we are. As you can see, wines from 2023, in the midst of the drought, are already starting to appear on this cheerful page. It's worthwhile, with such a green landscape, today, to remember and not forget what happened and may happen again.

Some of the winery's oldest wines still bear the name Celler Puig i Roca. They are the two partners who founded it. Josep Puig was the father of Silvia Puig, the talented, magical forest woman, the winemaker who makes the En Números Rojos wines in Priorat. I always tell her that we must, one day, uncork some of her father's old bottles. The other partner, Joan Roca, is now the commander of that very Roman ship. The Avgvstvs logo is the Arco de Berà, where—and this is what the grandmother in our story today remembers—not so long ago cars used to pass through.

Depending on the vintage, it will turn out different colors in the glass. I found the 23 to be golden, perhaps because the grape was suffering from thirst. It's a gastronomic wine that breaks the stereotype of "white for fish and red for meat." Albert, for example, drank it with his grandmother's Christmas cannelloni, which she believes needs to be worked on (and I, perhaps, am starting to be like her). "You can pair it with white meats or with a sea bream in the oven or with a burrata salad like the ones they make at El Barretet." He's referring to a burrata inside a tomato, drizzled with pistachio oil, made by the chef of a restaurant in the Foix reservoir. His name—he died—was Pep Sendra. Now, the restaurant is run by his partner, Ulises Luna. It's worth opening an Avgvstvs there, no matter the year.