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. <\/p>
This dramatic decision was inspired by the 1998 designation of Cap de Creus \u2014 the rocky outcrop in the hinterland of the seaside town of Cadaqu\u00e9s and the famous El Bulli restaurant \u2014 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. <\/p>
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\u2019s Espelt wine operation, which has the most vineyards, 172ha, in the local appellation of Empord\u00e0 (although the vast Perelada operation sells more wine). <\/p>
Espelt\u2019s tourist-friendly modern winery in Vilaju\u00efga is based quite far inland and draws from vineyards in several different locations, but I feel Anna\u2019s heart is most moved by those she was encouraged to plant in Cap de Creus, within sight of the sea. \u201cI feel very good in this place,\u201d 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. <\/p>
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. <\/p>
It was partly to honour Cap de Creus\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cnormal\u201d summer, let alone 2021 which, Espelt tells me, has so far seen just 153mm of rain. <\/p>
The precision of that number is testament to the pain imposed by the drought but also Espelt\u2019s scientific training. She was meant to be a biologist but in 2000 the opportunity to carry on her grandfather\u2019s 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. <\/p>
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\u2019s called Cala Rostella after a pine-covered outcrop overlooking El Bulli. <\/p>
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, \u201cFor many years we thought Empord\u00e0 was a red wine area but now we learn we should focus on whites too \u2014 especially from the local varieties Lledoner Blanc [Grenache Blanc], Lledoner Roig [Grenache Gris] and Carinyena Blanc [Carignan Blanc].\u201d <\/p>
Espelt also covertly converted the family\u2019s vineyards to organic viticulture and says she waited to break the news to her father, an agrochemical merchant, until after a bibulous Sunday lunch. <\/p>
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 Empord\u00e0 versions confirmed this. But La Vinyeta\u2019s 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\u2019t have that much actual flavour. Perhaps it will end up as a useful blending ingredient rather than as a varietal wine. <\/p>
La Vinyeta, set up by Josep and Marta Serra in 2002, is another particularly interesting operation, very much informed by the fact that Josep\u2019s brother is a designer in Barcelona. Microvins\u2019 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 caf\u00e9, sheep, cheeses and olive oil. La Vinyeta looks as though it belongs in California. <\/p>
Empord\u00e0 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\u2019s highest prices. Empord\u00e0 is perhaps too small to be similarly appreciated, even though the average age of these Empord\u00e0 vines, and their pale-skinned mutations, is impressively high. In a tasting of 73 Empord\u00e0 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 \u2014 a welcome change from throwing everything into the same vat. <\/p>
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, Empord\u00e0 is a mirror image of Roussillon, home of Banyuls, on the other side of the Pyrenees). But I won\u2019t 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. <\/p>
Exciting Empord\u00e0 wines<\/strong><\/p> 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. <\/p> WHITES <\/strong><\/p> REDS <\/strong><\/p> SWEET <\/strong><\/p> <\/p> Jancis Robinson. Published on Financial Times<\/a> and on Jancis Robinson<\/a> website in September 2021.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Empord\u00e0 is definitely on the move. It is well past its flirtation with international vine varieties\u2019 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225,227],"tags":[249,261,234],"class_list":["post-4632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-awards","category-news-en","tag-cap-de-creus-en","tag-sostenibilitat-en","tag-terroir-en"],"yoast_head":"\n