Parés Baltà open for “extreme wine tourism”

Second part of a Wine Pleasures winery visit programme I was lucky enough to witness. 

Our visit to Parés Baltà was the complete antithesis to Rimarts. For starters, Parés Baltà is an older (established in 1790), much bigger winery with a staff of over fifty and five estates. Rather than wandering around the depths of the cellar, a visit to the grounds and vineyards was the order of the day. Piling into the sturdy and muddy landrover, we went around one of the five estates, seeing innumerable types of grapes as well as some breathtaking vistas. Some of the sites of the vines had been vineyards for thousand of years, since pre-roman times. 

As we travelled around the estate, our guide Sylvia let us into the secrets of grape growing. There are many factors that effect the grapes. The first, and most important, is climate. Sylvia explained that though it can sometimes rain heavily, often there are long periods of little rain. When this happens they don´t water the grapes and just let nature take its course. This seemed counterintuitive until Sylvia argued that by watering the grapes you are influencing the wine and so the wines no longer reflects the environment it is grown in. Pares Baltà want their wines to be completely natural, a philosophy that is assuredly organic. The second important factor is the soil type. Over the estates the soil quality varies hugely. I picked up many soil facts as we went, for example with clay, colour doesn´t matter to the grapes. The clay colour is the result of mineral make up and the key factor with clay is the lack of water. 

Many of the grapes we saw were being grown for experimental reasons, to see how they´ll turn out and if they can improve their wines. Many of them are not yet on the wine list: as Sylvia puts it- grapes need to learn to make good wine. She claims to have caught the winemakers talking to grapes, giving them advice and encouragement. Some of their grapes are grown on land that is protected, meaning they have to work around the forest, using the land around the trees. During Eagle nesting time they can´t make any noise and have to wait to carry out any work on their grapes. Luckily the eagles weren´t nesting while we were there so up we went to investigate. The terrain by this time was getting rockier and rockier, the car lurching about as Sylvia attempted to get us to the peak. After a couple of tries we managed it, but it was a real taste of extreme wine tourism. Nestled at the top were the company bees, which were angered by our tour. Safe in the car, we learnt that the bee´s have an influence area of 10km. This means they can track their hives close to patches of rosemary and thyme and the bees will carry the aromas down to infuse the wine as they pollinate the grapes. The bees are not the only animal workers on the vineyards; sheep are also kept purely to eat the leaves after harvest and keep the plants healthy. 

As Sylvia chatted about her work and her home I really got a sense of wine as a way of life. Or, as Sylvia puts it “Everyone round here has wine in the veins.” Sylvia has worked at Parés Baltà for three years and has lived in the area all her life. Her childhood experiences are entwined with the area and the wines, with an open bottle of cava always on the table and the summer highlight of going through the grapes after the pickers had gone and bringing home brimming baskets of leftovers. 

By the end of the day I felt that I´d had a real back to nature experience and a reminder that the wine you see in a bottle has a natural beginning. And talking of wines you see in a bottle, we fit in the time to taste a few bottles before heading to the restaurant for a feast of a lunch. We tried Absis (2003) a 88% tempranillo, 12% cabernet sauvignon mix. There was a sense of caramel on the nose, smokey. The finish was subtle and complex. Oaky spicy yet chocolately, with a tanginess at the top of the lip. This wine is eighteen months in the barrel and solely hand harvested. The soil where the grapes are grown is poor and stony so the grapes are concentrated and have a low yield per acre.

We also tried the 2008 Calcari, made from a native and typical grape variety- Xarel-lo. With a grassy quality on the nose, it was creamy and tasty. Not as fruity as many of the wines I´d tried.

Amy Wilkerson. Wine Travel Writer for Wine Pleasures

Here is a video taken during part of the extreme wine tour visit. Enjoy!

Wine tasting in Parés Baltà with Sylvia and Joan:

Rimarts. Degorge “en directo” for wine tourists

Wine Pleasures – wine tasting tours.

Today we were joined by two Canadians to visit a couple of wineries, Rimarts and Pares Balta. Lois, a sommelier for Nyood Restaurant and Kultura Social, and her partner Joel were touring Spain and contacted Wine Pleasures to organise a one day winery visit programme to experience some superior Spanish cavas & wines. With that thought in mind, we headed straight to Rimarts to meet Ernest Martinez and try some of his cavas. More of a wine maker than a seller, Ernest took us straight down to the cellar to inspect the cavas and explain some different aspects of cavamaking. 

More than any of the other producers I have visited, Rimarts put a huge emphasis on handcrafting, watching carefully over every step to ensure the highest quality possible. This dedication was seen especially in the disgorging process, a 24 day endeavour that sees them turning each bottle incrementally, one eighth each day until the bottle is fully upright. Seeing as the winery is solely run by Ernest, his mother and his brother, this requires a lot of dedication from the trio. This commitment was also seen in the corking process, which involves 60,000 bottles being corked by hand. Ernest demonstrated the corking for us, which was a bit nervewracking, purely because to get the cork on he had to first get the original top off, something that he had to do incredibly quickly and then jam his finger on to stop the cava all fizzing out. Corking wasn´t something I had ever considered but it was quite elaborate and time consuming process. After the excitement of corking, we tried four wines varying in price between €8 and €23. Starting with €8 Brut Cava, my taste buds were clearly unrefined as I preferred this one to all others. 

Amy Wilkerson, wine travel writer for Wine Pleasures.

Watch the video and see how the degorge is done in “seco” ie without freezing the neck of the bottle. Only Cava producer to do the degorge in this way for his range of cavas.

Vijazz, Vilafranca del Penedès wine & jazz festival

The Vilafranca jazz festival, Vijazz, is in its third year and has gone from strength to strength. This year the organisers are expecting 45,000 people to descend on Vilafranca to take advantage of this free festival to see performers that would normally be charging €50 a ticket. 

We arrived in the square in Vilafranca and were immediately greeted by the enthusiastic jazz fusion of Spyro Gyra warming up for their evening gig. Amid the bustling hive of activity as they prepared for the events of the night, we were lucky to bump into Francesc Palau who was free for an interview. It was from him that I learnt of the attempts of the Penedes region to establish itself as an important wine tourism destination. The jazz is used as an enticement to bring visitors and the wine is the reason they stay; hopefully once the visitors leave, they´ll take with them a new appreciation of the wines of the Penedès. 

As well as being an opportunity to taste a huge range of cavas and wines, the festival was a social atmosphere that allowed me to get to know the personalities of the winemakers and personal stories behind some of the wines. Earlier in the day I had inquired after the meaning of the name of one of the Parés Baltà wines to be told ´Mas Elena´ translates from the Catalan into ´House of Elena´ in honour of one of their winemakers. The personal story helped to link the winery to the people that work there and establish it as a family business, despite its larger size. This impression of Parés Baltà was furthered when I had the chance to really talk to some of their staff at the festival. For example, Marc, who was talking me through some of the wines they had on offer, had just completed a masters degree in wine management. On top of this, Marc had spent 22 weeks travelling through the primary wine making regions of the World (both old and new), spending time in, among other places, Italy, France, South Africa and Australia. The enthusiasm he had for wine was evidently not just a job, but a passion. Even if I did not like the wines, I would have been won over by the passion shown by those who make them. 

Moving onto the Emendis stall, I tried the Nox wine, named for the latin word for night. As might be expected by this rather gothic name, the grapes (90% merlot, 10% pinot noir) are picked only once the sky is dark, the theory behind this being that the lower temperature allows the flavour of the grapes to come out. The smell of the Nox would seem to bear this out, with a strong and distinctive aroma of sour fruits; of strawberries and raspberries. On the tongue it had a strong body with a bitter aftertaste. Overall it was a complex and enjoyable wine. But with so many stalls still to visit, I had to move on. At the Loxarel stall I tried the Petit Arnau with a cherry aroma on the nose, and a bold, dry taste. Whilst chatting to the owner Joseph, I got to meet Petit Arnau himself, Josep´s young son – I snapped a shot of Arnau with his wine, but he seemed bemused more than anything by all the attention!

Navigating my way past the jazz brass band promenading the streets, I arrived at the Oriol Rossell stall to try their Brut Cava, which came across as a well rounded cava, bubbly and alive with a taste of almond and honey. However, by this time, my impressions of the wines began to blend in much the same way as the grapes and I could no longer trust my tongue to differentiate between the wines. It was time to leave.

Amy Wilkerson Wine Travel Writer for Wine Pleasures

Video interview with Francesc Palau with Spyro Gyra rehearsing in the background: