Ancestral with complexity and meaning

“I tried to awaken the conscience of the attendees in the face of the delicate moment the wine world is experiencing by insisting on its cultural and social work, which is very great”. Andreu Ortiz is the second generation of Celler Nin Ortiz, in Porrera. He has been recognized as one of the hundred young talents of gastronomy 2026 by the Basque Culinary Center, alongside sommeliers like Cyril Vermeulen and Paula Cuenda and the chefs and cousins Martí and Marc Roca (El Celler de Can Roca). “I don't receive it as a burden, it motivates me, it makes me excited. I left the event with a great desire to work even better and to overcome challenges”, he reveals. He studied international relations, which have served him in the wine world to foresee and prepare scenarios, to negotiate and to learn from opposing opinions. He has memories as a child in the field: pruning, carrying stones, on the tractor. As a teenager, he needed to distance himself from it.

“I am inheriting the revolution that the oenologist Ester Nin and my father Carles Ortiz started, but it is still underway. In 2000, they already began with biodynamic viticulture. They were the first to adopt the parcel philosophy, to recover varieties like white Carignan, to bottle with the Burgundy format. And the next thing is that we manage to lower the alcohol content of the DOQ Priorat wines, and not exceptionally due to the vintage. This does not affect their typicity”, he summarizes with vehemence and much prior deep reflection. And he adds: “I am privileged to grow up among such pure and perfect ideologies. They have done an excellent job from an ethical, mechanical and philosophical point of view, and that is complicated to improve”.

He settled into the winery quietly, and has always had his say. The adventure began in his second year of university, when he made an accidental ancestral wine, the result of a fermentation stop of Selma, a still wine. Now he has two of his own on the market: Astral and Selmot. The first, made with Garnatxa Negra from Priorat; the second, with Parellada from Pla de Manlleu. Vibrant, gastronomic and complex, the result of long aging. He provides an outlet for grapes that do not reach the required alcohol level, on one hand, and for underestimated varieties, on the other. “The condition they set for me was to first make an elderflower sparkling wine,” he admits. “I make them to stand up to entry-level traditional methods.” Few bottles and well placed. They sell out. With grafting, enthusiasm and wings for everything that is to come in Priorat –“Making the best wine every year, respecting the old vines and transmitting the expression of landscapes and varieties”–, he believes the place to grow is in Aiguamúrcia. Pla de Manlleu is an unknown place, with altitude, where the family roots of Ester Nin are found and now also the future purpose of Andreu Ortiz.