Sneak Preview of the 4 Bottles in My New Wine Club!
There's still room for you to join my new wine club. But time and space is running out! Here is more information on my exciting first box of wines.
Last month, I announced my new wine club, Beyond Everyday Drinking. So many of my loyal readers have already joined—thank you!! If you haven’t signed up yet, lucky for you, there is still room for new members. But don’t wait!
I’m capping membership in this club so that I can offer very special, hard-to-find, small production wines. Don’t miss out. Follow the link and join today.
Today, I want to talk about the four bottles I’ve selected for the first box, which ships on November 18th.
For the first shipment, I’ve focused on examples of “New Spain” wines, all from winemakers who I know and consider friends. From Catalonia, I’ve selected Celler Pardas ‘Sus Scrofa’ —a red from the native grape sumoll— and Celler Frisach ‘La Foradada’—a skin contact garnacha blanca from Terra Alta. From Rioja, I’m sending Oxer ‘Ahari’—a blend of tempranillo, graciano, and viura from 80- to 100-year-old vines. And from Jerez, there is Raul Moreno ‘La Esencia’—a super unique blend of palomino, PX, arinto, and tintilla that presents as a red wine, and drinks like a white wine.
Meet the winemakers, and learn more about the wines below. And sign up today!
Celler Pardas ‘Sus Scrofa’ 2023
I’ve fallen in love with the sumoll grape from Catalonia, which makes bright, fresh, delicate red wines if it’s grown and handled right. “Nobody loved sumoll until recently,” says Ramon Parera of Celler Pardas. In fact, Penedès didn’t even allow the grape in the appellation until 2009. “In the past, it was the most important red in the region. But it was really prolific, and it was planted in the wrong places. It’s a crazy grape. Sumoll needs struggle. It needs poorer soils. It needs drought.”
Sus Scrofa, his 100% bottling of old-vines sumoll, will be in my first club shipment. 50% whole cluster and aged in concrete tank, this is very much a red for contemporary tastes. Electric and lively. On the nose it’s almost like a young Nebbiolo with its earthiness and dark minerality. On the palate, there’s lots of juicy red and purple fruit, with edgy tannins and a cool, dry stony finish.
I recently visited Ramon, and in these (admittedly amateur) videos, he talks about Sus Scrofa, and about the sumoll grape:
Celler Frisach ‘La Foradada’ 2023
Terra Alta, the southernmost appellation in Catalonia, a little over two hours from Barcelona and not far from Tarragona, is sparsely populated, but rich with history. The Phoenicians were making wine here in 300 B.C. Pablo Picasso made some of his earliest Cubist paintings here, in the village of Horta de Sant Joan. Terra Alta is also where the Battle of the Ebro happened, the largest and longest battle of the Spanish Civil War.
“This is the most important region in the world for garnacha blanca,” says Francesc Frisach of Celler Frisach. “For us it’s a super Mediterranean variety, and it should be more savory—thyme, rosemary, fennel, brine.”
Terra Alta is a growing hotbed of organic farming and natural-leaning wines. Frisach’s father started working organic more than 30 years ago. “My father is a little bit of a hippy,” he says. “But this is a very pure area. Life is agricultural here. There’re not just vines, but also olives, almonds, and other crops.”
Celler Frisach ‘La Foradada’ is a wonderful skin-contact garnacha blanca. In Catalonia, orange wine is called brisat. Here, skin contact is not trendy, but rather a traditional local style that dates back centuries.
Oxer ‘Ahari’ 2022
Oxer Bastegieta of Oxer Wines was born in Gernika, the Basque town most of us know by its Spanish name Guernica—bombed by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil in 1937 at the request of then-emerging dictator Francisco Franco. The violence and destruction inspired Pablo Picasso’s powerful, moving anti-war painting. Oxer said Guernica inspired the label for Ahari, named after a mischief-making elf in Basque mythology with a tortured face. The quote on that bottle comes from Picasso: “Everything you can imagine is real.” Ahari is a blend of tempranillo, graciano, and viura from 80- to-100-year-old vineyards.
Oxer arrived in Rioja from Basque Country in 2009. “Nowhere else in the world has the old vineyards that we have here in Rioja, some of the oldest vines in the world,” he told me. “The problem is that people here don’t believe in themselves. There are so many mediocre wines here because people don’t believe they can make better. They are standing in front of the best vineyards in the world. They have to believe in themselves.” He added: “I believed it from the first fucking moment I got here.”
For Oxer, there’s a porous boundary between the human, plant, and spiritual worlds. “You have to feel the plant like a companion, not something you own and use,” he once told me. “Can you imagine what a 100-year-old vineyard knows? He learns the climate, he learns the conditions, the patterns. He begins to regulate himself. The plants can live without us. We can’t live without them.”
Here is Oxer speaking about Ahari over a wine-soaked lunch at Alameda, one of my favorite restaurants in Rioja:
Raul Moreno ‘La Esencia’ 2024
Raúl Moreno works in the Jerez appellation in Andalusia, in southern Spain—the region famous for sherry. Moreno farms slightly less than four hectares of organic vineyards, and manages another 22 hectares for a larger winery, with whom he shares a winery in a renovated 12th century estate.
Even though he is in Jerez, Moreno does not make traditional sherry under his own label. Recent rule changes in Jerez now allow “vino de pasto,” or non-fortified terroir wines, from the region. “The future of Jerez is non-fortified wines. But alternative varieties and field blends are also the future,” Moreno says.
Moreno went to university in Australia, which back then he considered freer thinking and more experimental than more conservative enology schools in Spain. “They wanted us to be creative and take risks,” he said. “I remember one guy, for an assignment, took Sauvignon Blanc and infused it with kiwi fruit. And he got good marks! That always left an impression on me.”
After school, Moreno worked for large, industrial wineries as well as small, organic ones. He’s lived half his adult life in Australia and South Africa, only returning to Spain in 2021 to start his own project. He’s someone who’s seen everything in wine—industrial and natural, Old World and New World, conventional and organic, heavy intervention and minimal intervention. He’s a winemaker who knows all the tricks. One highly regarded natural winemaker recently told me, “Raúl is playing chess while we are all playing checkers.” When I post photos of Moreno or his wines on Instagram, other winemakers and sommeliers in Spain regularly comment “Maestro!”
La Esencia, his field blend, is a mix of palomino, Pedro Ximénez, and arinto, along with the local red grape tintilla. It’s fermented whole cluster and then aged in 1000-liter amphorae. It presents as a red wine, and drinks like a white wine.
Click to join the wine club today!
