Last Friday, Anna Espelt was on the special program of El Món a Rac1 from Llançà. With Anna Vallhonesta we talked about viticulture and traveling the world and returning to Born. Of what we have learned and of all the work we have left to do.

We are always glad to explain our work. Our land, the sea and the mountains, is what defines us and what marks the wines of the Empordà. Explaining ourselves and the territory means talking about our wines and understanding them a little more. We took a look at the why of the integral management between natural parks and vineyards and we talked about how we manage them to promote biodiversity in the lands we cultivate and about the sea, the tramuntana and the sun. Three key aspects that accompany us and that define our wines.

You can relive the interview and tell us about!

The first scores of the Peñín 2023 Guide have already been released. Coma Bruna, Quinze Roures, Pardells and Les Elies share the podium and we are very proud of it.

During the summer months and a few weeks before the start of the harvest, the Peñín Guide, the renowned guide in Spain, publishes the wine scores from all the DOs. On this occasion, Espelt has received excellent scores for Les Elies (more than 94 points and waiting for the second round of tasting), Pardells (91 points), Coma Bruna (92 points), Quinze Roures (91 points), Terres Negres (92 points) and Sauló (88 points). Our wines are a reflection of a small part of our territory. We try to transmit a landscape and a restless spirit: that of the Empordà. We are aware that the land where we live and the soils where our vines grow are the great value we have inherited from our ancestors. That is why we make wine respecting life, the soil, the earth. That’s why we work in ecological.

These scores are very good news. They give us strength to continue this project of organic viticulture and biodiversity regeneration. In our online shop you will find them all!

The end of the vineyard cycle is near. We already have well-populated berries and we are waiting for not last minute surprises. We have a look back on this intense year’s harvest.

We are facing this harvest with a desire to review the last few months. We worked hard and received the support of such spectacular visits as Jancis Robinson in September. There are eight generations of winemakers who endorse us, but there is always time for innovation. We now feel that we are facing a stage of maturity and consolidation. Our project based on respect for the land and the sustainable management of resources is more than twenty years old and that’s quite impressive even for us.

Our comprehensive management of the vineyards tries to take care of the biodiversity of the area. Encouraging the preservation and improvement of biodiversity is right now the cornerstone of our project. After the fire in Mas Marès, in February, we had a test (which we had never wanted) of the good work done in Cap de Creus. This Mediterranean mosaic project, an agricultural management system that combines different types of agricultural areas (pastures, vineyards and high protection areas) has been shown to be the best fire prevention.

Awards and pending work

After all, we try to make our wines as an expression of small pieces of Empordà landscape. This is the territory we consciously care for. We couldn’t do it any other way. The reward for this work over the years has been recognized recently by the awards received. In first place, Pla de Tudela – Anna Espelt (Best Picapoll Blanc segons La Guia de Vins de Catalunya 2022). Then it was the turn of Les Elies (Gold Medal Grenaches du Monde 2022). Finally, the silver medals of the WWA Decanter 2022 for Coma Bruna (100% Carignan) and Lledoner Roig (100% Grey Grenache).

Finally, the visit this spring of Dylan Grigg, an expert in viticulture, has helped us to make a panoramic reflection of everything we have advanced. We have done a lot of work on local varieties, on resilience, on bearded vines, on potted vines. It has also helped us to make a stop and see everything we have left to do. Little by little we are making our way!

Coma Bruna (91 points) and Lledoner Roig (92 points) received the Decanter Silver Medal, one of the most important recognitions in Europe. These are two Decanter Silver medals in addition to the Bronze Medals for Terres Negres (89 points) and Quinze Roures (88 points).

We are very pleased with this new recognition we receive from one of the most prestigious competitions in Europe: Decanter World Wine Awards. On this occasion, the Decanter Silver Medal goes for two wines that are an homage to the most essential Empordà terroir, Coma Bruna, 100% Carignan, and Lledoner Roig, 100% Gray Grenache.

These are two wines that were the beginning of a long reflection for the recovery of local varieties, such as Carignan (red, white) and also Gray Greanche (also called lledoner roig). Both are also wines that come from our oldest vineyards, from Rabós, and that express in a particular way a terroir of shales, from vineyards in vas, very adapted to our microclimate.

In this edition of Decanter World Wine Awards we also received the Bronze Medal for Terres Negres and Quinze Roures. These two Espelt flagship wines represent our desire to make Empordà wines, ecological, that express the territory. Since the 2020 vintage, they have both been ecologically certified, a further step in our commitment with our landcape and its ecosystem. You can find them in our store!

Les Elies, our tribute to the red Grenache, has received the Grenaches du Monde Gold Medal.

This week we received an award from one of the great competitions in northern Catalonia: Grenaches du Monde. On this occasion, our wine Les Elies has been awarded the Gold Medal, given by the Interprofessional Council of Roussillon Wines. We are very excited to receive this award, as it is a recognition of our effort to recover local varieties and make authentic wines, without intervention.

Les Elies is our homage to the red Grenache, which in the Empordà we call black hawthorn. This wine is named after the plot that Anna’s grandfather, Lluís, received as a dowry from Grandma Quimeta’s family. Les Elies is a wine made from selected grapes harvested by hand. Every year we reserve the best red hawthorn grapes to make this wine that is complex and soft.

This Grenaches du Monde Gold Medal is also a prize in the Empordà terroir. Les Elies is a wine that reflects our terroir without masks or artifices and shows us who we are. A wine that you will enjoy from the first to the last glass of wine. You can accompany with both lean meats and long-cooked roasts.

You will find it in our store!

Our wines have received very good scores in La Guia de Vins de Catalunya and highlights Pla de Tudela, award for Best White Picapoll.

A new edition of La Guia de Vins de Catalunya, a reference guide to the Catalan Countries that includes a large part of the wines made in our territory. We are very happy with the good scores obtained and especially with the prize in Pla de Tudela, a 100% picapolla monovarietal wine from Anna Espelt’s most personal project, on the Mas Marés estates.

The variety of white picapoll, which in the Empordà we call picapolla, is one of the many varieties that have been found in our region for a long time. The library of varieties that we made has allowed us to identify in old vineyards and then move to other places, such as the Mas Marés estate. It is in these vineyards where we decided to replant the white picapoll as a local variety. It is very well adapted to the climate of the area and therefore more resistant to changes that may come due to the climate emergency.

We were already in love with our white picapoll plants, some of the most beautiful we had ever seen. Now we have one more reason to be proud of this award for a wine from the personal project of Anna Espelt Pla de Tudela. This is a recognition for a long time work to recover local varieties and make them a place in our winery. Here are the other excellent scores:

• La Vella 2019 9.79
• Pardells 2018 9.76
• Les Elies 2018 9.78
• Pla de Tudela 2019 9.74 and Best Picapoll Blanc Award
• Cala Rostella 2018 9.71
• Lledoner Roig 2018 9.70
• Comabruna 2017 9.65

‘Empordà is definitely on the move. It is well past its flirtation with international vine varieties’

The Catalans seem to take conservation seriously. To the extent of removing an entire Club Med holiday village in order to restore the geologically unique north-eastern tip of the region to its natural state. Knocking down more than 400 buildings, which admittedly looked as integrated within the landscape as a caravan site, is surely taking rewilding to a new level.

This dramatic decision was inspired by the 1998 designation of Cap de Creus — the rocky outcrop in the hinterland of the seaside town of Cadaqués and the famous El Bulli restaurant — as a protected natural park. By 2010 the resort had been excised from the landscape and today the extraordinary rock formations of Tudela, where the Club once was, are again as nature intended.

On the August Saturday morning that I visited, the carefully landscaped trails were dotted with shiny Lycra as runners and cyclists made their determined way up them. My host was the energetic Anna Espelt, who runs her family’s Espelt wine operation, which has the most vineyards, 172ha, in the local appellation of Empordà (although the vast Perelada operation sells more wine).

Espelt’s tourist-friendly modern winery in Vilajuïga is based quite far inland and draws from vineyards in several different locations, but I feel Anna’s heart is most moved by those she was encouraged to plant in Cap de Creus, within sight of the sea. “I feel very good in this place,” she smiles as she takes in the view of the deep blue Mediterranean, the resort town of Roses in the distance and a bronze-age menhir that was unearthed by her father at the foot of her vineyards.

Before the phylloxera louse, which is fatal to vine roots, arrived back in 1879, Catalonia was wine country. By the turn of that century, a wine region with about 10,000ha of vines had been almost wiped out. Today, evidence of the 30,000km of painstakingly built stone terraces for vines can be seen on many a hillside. There are currently only 1,821ha of vines in production in this recently revived denomination.

It was partly to honour Cap de Creus’s viticultural legacy that Espelt planted vineyards there. The vine trunks were so spindly I thought they were only a handful of years old but they bear witness to how tough conditions here are for vines. The chilly tramuntana whistles through the mountains from the north, and the vines are buffeted by winds off the sea too. The park’s guardians are keen to encourage biodiversity. They see vines as more fire-resilient than many other plants in a landscape that is tinder-dry in a “normal” summer, let alone 2021 which, Espelt tells me, has so far seen just 153mm of rain.

The precision of that number is testament to the pain imposed by the drought but also Espelt’s scientific training. She was meant to be a biologist but in 2000 the opportunity to carry on her grandfather’s wine-producing legacy lured her back from California where she had been a cellarhand. She was very much thrown in at the deep end. Nineteen years ago, they planted 25ha of vines on Cap de Creus, partly to encourage others. Her first mistake, she says, was the decision to trellis the vines on wires rather than plant them as standalone bush vines, which would possibly have been more resilient and less thirsty. Nevertheless, the single-vineyard varietal wines they have yielded since 2017 are pretty impressive.

She has named them after places on Cap de Creus that have a special meaning for her. The white, made from Picapolla, as they call tangy Clairette grapes here, is called Pla de Tudela, after the beach where she particularly likes to swim. The red is made from Garnacha, a grape that is called Lledoner Negre here, and seems to be slimmed down and freshened up with each successive vintage. It’s called Cala Rostella after a pine-covered outcrop overlooking El Bulli.

These special bottlings are offered at the same price and I wondered if the Spanish market was ready to pay so much for a white wine. I was assured that the white sells out faster than the red, although admittedly it is made in smaller quantities. According to Espelt, “For many years we thought Empordà was a red wine area but now we learn we should focus on whites too — especially from the local varieties Lledoner Blanc [Grenache Blanc], Lledoner Roig [Grenache Gris] and Carinyena Blanc [Carignan Blanc].”

Espelt also covertly converted the family’s vineyards to organic viticulture and says she waited to break the news to her father, an agrochemical merchant, until after a bibulous Sunday lunch.

She pioneered the local renaissance of Grenache Gris, which can make arguably more interesting and perfumed wines than the pale-skinned Grenache Blanc. I had previously been rather unimpressed by the Carignan Blancs I had tasted in the Pyrenees in France, and one or two of the Empordà versions confirmed this. But La Vinyeta’s Microvins 2019, aged for 14 months in old French oak barrels and tasted at its stylish winery, won me over. It was dense, vibrant and had rather impressive grip. That said, both Josep Serra, co-founder of La Vinyeta, and Anna Espelt admitted that the grape doesn’t have that much actual flavour. Perhaps it will end up as a useful blending ingredient rather than as a varietal wine.

La Vinyeta, set up by Josep and Marta Serra in 2002, is another particularly interesting operation, very much informed by the fact that Josep’s brother is a designer in Barcelona. Microvins’ labels are a lesson in providing useful, geeky information in a clever, attractive way. And the team at La Vinyeta have really shown the locals how to entice visitors, with their outdoor café, sheep, cheeses and olive oil. La Vinyeta looks as though it belongs in California.

Empordà is very definitely on the move. It is well past its flirtation with international vine varieties and is now concentrating on the two most-planted varieties, both local: Lledoner Negre and Carinyena Negra, or Grenache and Carignan. These are the same varieties that dominate Priorat, the wine region that fetches Catalonia’s highest prices. Empordà is perhaps too small to be similarly appreciated, even though the average age of these Empordà vines, and their pale-skinned mutations, is impressively high. In a tasting of 73 Empordà wines recently, I was also delighted to see that some of the best wines included single-vineyard bottlings by one of the handful of co-ops — a welcome change from throwing everything into the same vat.

Some of the best wines of all are the strong, sweet ones, made in a wide range of ways and a number of them are completely stunning (after all, in terms of geology and climate, Empordà is a mirror image of Roussillon, home of Banyuls, on the other side of the Pyrenees). But I won’t waste space saying any more about them since I know how unfashionable such wonders are at the moment. I do hope their day will come. Together with their dry counterparts.

Exciting Empordà wines

I gave all these wines at least 17 points out of 20 and am very sad to see how few of them make it to the UK.

WHITES

• Clos d’Agon, Clos d’Agon 2018 13.5%
• Espelt, Pla de Tudela 2018 12.5%
  • €36.90 espeltviticultors.com, $75 European Cellars in the US

REDS

• Castillo de Perelada, Aires de Garbet 2017 14.5%
• Castillo de Perelada, Finca La Garriga 2016 14%
• Espelt, Cala Rostella 2018 and 2017 14.8%
  • €36.90 from espeltviticultors.com
• Masia Serra, Aroa 2018 14.5%
• Mas Vida, Vida Nua 2017 14%
• Roig Parals, Camí de Cormes Carinyena Vinyes Centenàries 14.5%
  • £60 Seckford, £70 Fine + Rare plus duty and VAT (2007)
• Sota els Àngles, Sota els Àngels 2019 13%
• La Vinyeta, Microvins Carinyena Negra Bota 2018 15%

SWEET

• Masia Serra, Ino NV 16%
• Vinyes dels Aspres, Bac de les Ginesteres NV 14.5%
  • £36.50 Albion Wine Shippers (2004)

Jancis Robinson. Published on Financial Times and on Jancis Robinson website in September 2021.

This summer we have collected a good sample of awards and recognitions that help us continue the learning path we started more than twenty years ago. Sauló Gold Vinari for Young Wines and magnificent scores in the Peñín and Decanter WWA indicate us the path.

We are very happy with the Golden Vinari Wine Award for Young Wines for Sauló that we obtained in the contest of July. A prize for a wild wine, which takes us to the undergrowth of the garriga, our terraprim. Aromatic herbs, subtlety and silkiness, for a young man who seems wiser than he appears. With this blend of red Grenache and Carignan we find memories of poorly domesticated Empordà mountains (flowers, violets and rosemary), with tastes that persist after first taste. This award is for us the recognition of a young wine that we love very much, because it is part of our soul. Our Lledoner Rosat has also received the Silver Vinari in Young Rosé Wine, another recognition for an insultingly young wine, very versatile, with an attractive red and spicy taste. The scores of the usual summer guides have not left us indifferent either. Of the Empordà Tasting of the Peñín Guide, the 94 points of Les Elies stand out, which places it in the great of the excellent wines according to this guide. Our homage to the red Grenache is a wine full of hidden corners, like the grapes we choose to make every year: the best of the harvest. Also noteworthy are ComaBruna with 93 points, Terres Negres with 92 points, and Quinze Roures and Sol i Vent with 90 points. A total of five wines above 90 points.

On the other hand, Decanter has also published its Decanter World Wine Awards scores: Silver Medal for Sol i Vent (90 points); and Bronze Medal for the Quinze Roures (88 points), Terres Negres (86 points) and Sauló (87 points).

We are very happy with a new award for our Sauló: Silver Medal of Grenaches du Monde. Sauló is a young wine made from Grenache and Carignan. Born between the plain and the mountains, in the Mediterranean scrub. Wild, with aromas of undergrowth, honesty at first glance. We invite you to try it, it goes well even a little cold! Buy it right here, we’ll take it home.

The final Guía Peñín 2021 scores are out! As you all know, Guía Peñín is the most popular wine guide in Spain, so we are very happy with the good scores obtained in all the wines presented.

We are especially excited about the 94 and 93 points of Les Elies and Pardells, two wines qualified as excellent that confirm the exceptionality of their taste and aroma. Specifically, our tribute to the black Grenache, Les Elies, is according to this Guide the best Grenache of the Empordà, and ComaBruna, a monovarietal of very old vines of Carignan, the best of the Empordà in this variety, also according to the Peñín Guide. These scores invite us to taste, enjoy and recommend Espelt wines overwide!