Wine & Spirits - August 2019 - 36

The wine he makes from La Prats is not easy to classify in
contemporary terms: Halfway between a rosé and a red, it
has herbal and fruity aromas, together with a slightly rustic
texture and charming fruit flavors. "I use neither selected
yeasts nor sulfur, and vinify with as little intervention as possible," he tells me while we taste the wine in the midst of the
vines at La Prats. "What I think I get here is what Carbonell
got; that's what this particular vineyard has to offer me," he
says, adding, "This is how I want to live. All this is what makes
me happy."

most unique vineyard landscapes in Spain.
Artigas first came across the vines at La Prats while he was
studying oenology, and getting to know the vineyards near
his village, Vilassar. He remembers coming across a small
2.5-acre vineyard that looked abandoned, but when he went
to check out the vines, the owner chased him away, throwing stones. That was his first meeting with Josep Carbonell.
"He was a very special person, like a man from other
times,"Artigas recalls. "A kind of eccentric millionaire, who
kept bags of money in his house, but who lived a very austere life, without comforts, as in the Middle Ages." Artigas is
now safely standing in the middle of a small parcel of vines
crowded between factories and houses and facing the sea,
just a few yards away.
While Carbonell was throwing stones at him, he was also
shouting complaints, that the vineyard was useless, that
the grapes were as big as ping-pong balls. But Artigas was
charmed by those old vines. He kept returning to check on
them and finally convinced Carbonell that he could help
work the vines. "The truth is that I loved the vineyard, but I
also saw that Josep was very old and had trouble moving. I
felt sorry for him," Artigas admits.
Carbonell and Artigas ended up becoming friends and,
after Carbonell died, Artigas continued to work the vines.
Dating to 1913, half of them are pansa blanca, Alella's most
widely planted variety, with other grapes such as summol and
beier mixed in. "And there are at least 25 others that I have
not been able to identify," Artigas says.
Although he initially vinified the white varieties and the
reds separately, he changed his strategy in 2013 and started
to make only one wine from the parcel, harvesting all the
grapes together in a single day, on September 11 of each year.
"The old people of the town told me that this was how it was
done, all at once. And I chose September 11 because here it is
a holiday and so I have the time. By September 11, the pansa
blanca is already ripe, but about ten percent of the grapes in
the vineyard are still green when they arrive at the winery
and another twenty percent arrive as raisins. I like the mix."
36

WINE & SPIRITS

AUGUST 2019

n equally singular landscape enchanted Pepe
Raventós, technical director of Raventós i Blanc,
the first time he saw it. He was out for a long bike
ride in the mountains of southern Penedès and
he found an abandoned vineyard, about 50 acres of oldvine parellada, xarello and summol, a red grape. It was surrounded by close to 1,000 acres of old-growth forest and, at
the top, a masía, an old Catalàn farmhouse built out of stone.
Raventós was fascinated by the place, and found records
of the estate dating back to the 17th century, when it was
known as Can Sumoi. Isolated and wild, the property rises
2,000 feet above the Mediterranean, which it faces directly
to the east. By the time Raventós bought the estate in 2017,
no one had tended the vineyards in decades and the forest
was advancing on the vines.

(TOP LEFT) XARELLO
VINES AT CAN SUMOI;
(TOP RIGHT) PEPE
RAVENTOS GROWS LOCAL
VARIETIES AT CAN SUMOI,
BLENDING HIS ESTATEGROWN FRUIT WITH
GRAPES FROM NEIGHBORING VINEYARDS.
(RIGHT) CAN SUMOI RISES
2,000 FEET ABOVE AND
LIES DIRECTLY EAST OF
THE MEDITERRANEAN.

Wine & Spirits - August 2019

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