“Do you remember we spoke two years ago?” Javi Bueno asks me. “We were in the hospital, about to give birth!” That’s right. I called him to try one of the wines we’ve made in this section, and he told me he was about to become a father to Luka. The mother is an extraordinary sommelier: Ariadna Rubinart, who works for the Varma group, dedicated to the distribution of spirits. He works for the Peralada group.

To talk about this winery, Tomàs Cusiné, whom I love and admire so much, one of the emblems of the Costers del Segre DO (Tomàs Cusiné was its president), I spoke with Dacil Estapá. Officially, the sales director. Unofficially, one of the heart and soul of the place. I really like her name, and I can't resist sharing it with you. It's a Guanche name, from the lost language of this culture, about which we know so little, from the Canary Islands. Her mother was from Santa Cruz. Dacil is a Guanche princess, meaning she was the daughter of a mencey, a king. The Berbers invaded the island and, as has always happened, they devastated everything. This mysterious civilization is related, genetically and culturally, to the Berbers.

Perhaps you, fellow wine lovers, have seen a bottle of wine called Cabró in supermarkets. Nobody gives you so much for around five euros. This is the famous offspring of today's winery, Finca Emendis, but what we have in our glasses isn't the famous offspring. Salvador Vallès, Marta's father, whom I'm speaking with and whom I'll introduce to you shortly, has been making cava, primarily, for some time now. He always said he wanted to make cava. It was his dream. But Marta Vallès's grandfather died when his son, and Marta's father, was nineteen, so he started working in construction to support his mother, Cecilia Ferrer, and his three younger siblings. He worked hard, saved money, and in 2006 bought the farmhouse next to his house. The Puigmoltó farmhouse, which had a vineyard. He began making cava in the farmhouse's small, home-based winery. The first harvest was in 2006 and the first vintage in 2007. One of the white wines they made was Trio (the traditional Cava blend), which, aside from changing a lot, will be the last one released this year. "El Cabró has been a huge hit, I don't think I have any complaints about it, quite the opposite," says Marta, "but we feel more like Cava producers than winemakers."

This is a friend's wine. But it's a friend's wine because I like to befriend people who are happy doing the things they're talented at. With Àngel Vendrell, the inventor of Ouiea Vins, you'd all want to go to dinner.

You might wonder, of course, why today's wine is called 30.70, and perhaps, upon reflection, you'll conclude that it describes a blend: 70% Garnacha Blanca and 30% Muscat of Alexandria. Let's pause for a moment to consider this variety. If you follow these pages, you'll already know. that in the Ampans Association, from BagesThey have a wine made from muscado From Alexandria. Joan Soler, an admired and renowned winemaker, always explains, regarding this Muscat from Ampans, that these are things of history. Just as a bridge "that has always been here" is the "Devil's Bridge," figs that come from very, very far away are "Moorish figs." Muscat doesn't come from Alexandria, but Alexandria seems "exotic" to us.

They are two Dutch winemakers: Dido, she; Jurriaan, he, who, after traveling the world's wine scene, ended up in Alt Empordà and fell in love with the land. If you see them, so happy and untamed, you'll understand the kind of wines they make. This happens sometimes; you see the winemaker and you understand the wine they make or made. Whenever I've been lucky enough to taste Didier Daggenau's wines with someone, I've shown them that picture of him—with his Viking beard and hair—wearing a headscarf, standing in the middle of the vineyard. The wine is what he was.

It seems to me that this season we've had very few 2024 wines in our glasses. This, the twenty-fourth, is the first vintage normal In many years. We've come through hurricanes, downpours, mildew, the pandemic, and, of course, drought. We've already tasted many of the drought wines, and they're extraordinary (but there are fewer of them). I'm happy because we're in Pla de Bages and we're drinking a Picapoll, one of my favorite white wines, for its simplicity, for the orange peel and aniseed notes I love to find, for the modernity and antiquity of the variety. The emblematic white variety of this wine-growing region. Go to the area's magnificent restaurants and you'll see that, besides intelligent Catalan cuisine, they naturally have Picapoll Bagencs to pair with your meal. Please don't miss Cal Jepet in Sant Cristóbal; Las Vegas, Ca n'Aliguer, or Ara un Vino in Manresa; Cal Ladis in Sant Fruitós; Can Jaume in Marganell; El Terrer in Santpedor... I'm leaving some out!

Today we're introducing a project called Love for the Earth. And what is it? Well, it revolves around a wine called natural either craftsmanHowever we want to put it, there's always a farmer working the land and completing the cycle by selling wine. Here, in this project, is Salvador Batlle, whom you might know as the heart and soul of the much-admired Còsmic winery. Of course, there's the master winemaker Jaume Jordà, who runs a distributor of (natural) wines in Vic. Another extraordinary team was also involved: the two brothers who run the Monocrom restaurant in Barcelona (don't miss it!). Jaume has been working in distribution for eight years. "We've invented a lot of modern innovation and then gone back. We've explored many paths, and I can tell you that I've dedicated more time to..." fix What appears to be natural wine is different from what natural wine actually is. Wines with many defects have been made, and this idea has taken hold: natural wine can have defects. Natural wine should be good, and if you make it, it's not to be cool.

Today's wine is the fruit of an extraordinary story, so fascinating that I'm warning you now that, as far as I'm concerned, it won't end here. We have a Montsant, a blend of Garnacha and Cariñena, from vines between 60 and 80 years old, from the 1922 vintage, when the drought was just beginning. The estate, which was registered in 1827, has always had crops, especially hazelnut trees. I imagine, of course, that in the 1980s a fifty-kilo sack of hazelnuts was worth the same as two thousand kilos of grapes. The grapes were taken to the cooperative. Today's wine comes from the most granitic part of the estate, in a steep area facing east, but sheltered by a mountain that keeps it in shadow all morning. Toni Ripoll, son of the protagonist of this story, tells me—while watching the sunset—that the first wine from the estate was made by his father, under the Tarragona DO. It was called Pascona. And now, let's begin.

We have in the glass an ancestral wine, a sparkling wine that has fermented only once, not twice, like cava or champagne. I am convinced that ancestral wine, that sparkling wine that has always been made in such a "natural" way, taking wine from the vat, bottling it, and letting it finish fermenting in the bottle, is a cheerful and informal gateway to bringing young people closer to wine culture. Today's winery, Álvaro González Marcos, bears the name of the winemaker. "I'm in an area with abundant Xarel·lo, the part closest to Barcelona, ​​​​in Sant Llorenç d'Hortons, on a farm called Can Raimundet," says Álvaro. "I came to the world of viticulture late and I've kept the vineyards that no one wanted. Mine are Xarel·lo."

Since every region fights its own battle, in Penedès we talk about Xarel·lo, but in Alella we talk about white raisin, and we drink the same variety. Garnacha, our beloved Garnacha, in Empordà is called white hackberry. In fact, in Empordà I've only heard them talk about Garnacha when referring to sweet wine.

Today in the glass we have a unique and enviable project. Single Vineyards Collectors are three friends who seek out old vines that are abandoned or don't have a caretaker. They recover and care for them. Today's magnificent Xarel lo is from a vineyard in the Macizo del Garraf DO, surrounded by a dry stone path, which everyone knows as Mas Marroquí.

Joan Fernández and Martí Just do everything together. They make today's unique wine, the red with Sumoll, Mandó, and a bit of Tempranillo fermented in a medieval stone winepress. Since 2016, going to draw the wine from the stone winepress—or going to see how they make it—is a unique spectacle. "We make it the way they did." before", they tell me smiling, with the smile of those who are very happy doing what they do.

Alba Domènech, our protagonist today, doesn't come from a winemaking family, nor does she own vineyards or a winery. She studied human biology and completed a doctorate in biomedicine. "I studied oxidative stress, which all organisms suffer from, and that is the basis of aging," she explains. And it was during that doctorate that she worked with the fascinating and magical world of yeasts. This is where it all began. "I returned to Falset, where I'm from, and at the Wine Technology Park I met Josep Lluís Pérez." He is the founding viticulturist of Mas Martinet, an essential figure, a wine genius recognized and respected everywhere. He is also the father of Sara Pérez, the winemaker who inaugurated this cheerful section. "I went with Josep Lluís Pérez and his grandchildren, Sara and René's children, to a place they owned, which they called Cal Millonari. There we learned to plant, to experiment, to microvinify..."

Today, the glass we hold in our hands invites us, toasting, to a double learning experience. If you've come here out of curiosity, you're welcome, and be content knowing that today's wine is a Monedero ancestral wine. But if, in addition to being curious, you're part of "the enjoyment gang" (a few Gaudineros, a few Goznes, a few Gaudinaires?), you'll want to know everything. An ancestral wine is a sparkling wine that undergoes its secondary fermentation in the bottle. You take the wine, which hasn't yet finished fermentation, bottle it, and put a metal stopper on it to prevent it from spurting out. Moneu is a Catalan variety that disappeared in the 1980s. Celler Torres revived it in 1998, and since 2008, the Incavi (National Institute of Wine and Spirits), which oversees and curates our extremely varied and prized vineyards, has authorized its planting. There are ten or twelve hectares of Moneu in Catalonia. Only six winegrowers in all of Catalonia produce Monedero. And among them, Incavi assures us that there's only one who makes the ancestral wine. I introduce you to Lambert Perera, who, along with his two hands, is the one-man band of today's winery.

"I'm putting out fires, right now!" Josep Serra tells me, the soul, the winemaker, the manager, and every other title we can think of at the Serra y Barceló winery: Serra, for him, Barceló, for the mother of his children. He is the everything to this Corbera d'Ebre project, under the auspices of the Terra Alta DO. "We winegrowers have to do everything to survive. We're tightrope walkers."

I'm still waiting to speak with Mireia Torres (from Torres), one of the people I know who best tastes and understands the soul of wines, their truth. We've chosen, from her collection, 3055. This number.

"I'm in Sopletes, I'm going crazy. We harvested last week and today I filled my boots. Tomorrow I'm going to Recaredo," he tells me. He's Ton Mata, the simple and brilliant peasant (ah, yes... what a pleasure to say "pagés") who has achieved, with all the people of Recaredo, with the memory of his father, who had faith and genius, the coveted, historic 100 Parker points for a Catalan sparkling wine. The Enoteca Turó d'en Mota 2001 of Recaredo.The first sparkling wine in Spain, the first in the world outside of Champagne, to achieve this. This corpinnado achieves what only nine wineries in the world have achieved, all of them French: Salón, Bollinger, Krug, Louis Roederer, Jacques Selosse, Ulysse Collin, Cédric Bouchard, Egly-Ouriet, and Philipponnat.

Is alcohol-free, or dealcoholized, wine wine? There will be those, like me, who say no, that it isn't, that it's something else, and a very worthy one at that. But then you have to wonder why we don't ask ourselves if we're actually beer-free. They make ads, ads that make you think, more than about the product authorized for TV, about the brand behind it. We've normalized it, alcohol-free beer. Bricklayers, people who work in hazardous jobs, for example, you see them drinking it for breakfast. And you think, then, that this could happen with wine. Pregnant women, drivers...

Anna Gallissà, the winemaker behind the GR-174, says it's the estate's most representative wine. GR stands for Gran Recorrido (Great Route). These are the paths marked on the mountain, with identifying colors and a number. The GR-174 circumnavigates the entire Priorat region, and in the bottle that bears its name, there's also wine from all over Priorat. "The GR passes through our estate, but we don't have enough grapes, so we buy from Bellmunt, Poboleda, Torroja, Gratallops, El Lloar..." From south to north.