Respect and consistency. These are the words that Nuria Renom repeats most when she talks about her passion, which keeps her busy from dawn to dusk: the production of natural wines in a bucolic corner of Alt Penedès (Barcelona). This independent winemaker does not hesitate to admit that she has found her place in the world among the vineyards, on a farm surrounded by woods and with a hundred olive trees. He purchased it in 2021 with his partner, Arola Tous Galí, and their common dream is to settle here, surrounding themselves with friends, family and visitors who share the same enthusiasm for simplicity. His wish is that the Can Barceló estate, in the Les Cantarelles neighborhood of the municipality of Sant Martí Sarroca, produces around 50,000 bottles of wine a year and, at the same time, becomes a small wine tourism accommodation facility. But without the details of an opulent hotel, they clarify. They don’t want any luxury that disturbs the peace of this place.
Natural wine is now a name on everyone’s lips, especially among young people, but Nuria Renom is not convinced of this term, despite having been one of the pioneers in promoting winemaking without additives as a sommelier at the Brutal bar in Barcelona, which since 2013 has become a reference temple for producers and drinkers. “The big change was to talk about people instead of cellars,” he says with a glass in hand in reference to this movement. Not having found a more appropriate name, he defines his way of making wine with this common phrase: “Maximum respect for the wine, for the vineyard, for the land, for others, for the people who help you and for the customer”. With the same enthusiasm with which he lives, he underlines: “We must tell the truth to the consumer. My commitment is my name printed on the bottles, I put my whole life into it.”
He started making wine in 2014, with a first test in Garraf proving a bit of a disaster. But he learned many things from that mistake, including that he would not add more sulfites. Since 2015 it has aligned itself with sustainable artisanal production. This means a respectful base, with a minimum of ecological treatment of the vineyard and without the addition of yeasts or any type of additive during the winemaking process, followed by spontaneous fermentation. This does not mean that we do not intervene during transformation by controlling the temperature or preventively treating the vine with sulfur and, if necessary, copper to control fungal diseases. «You can’t talk about quality wine if you don’t talk about respect for the vineyard and the land», he courageously defends. Four years ago it strengthened its brand by purchasing Can Barceló, a farm protected as a Cultural Property of Local Interest, which was in ruins. There is a lot of work to do, but the first thing is the wine, the business that must cement everything else.
This is a land of white and sparkling wines, made with grapes grown on limestone soils, “which give the wine this salinity, electrical conduction and good acidity”, he points out. Surrounded by 150 hectares of forest, the estate has 16 hectares of vineyards, of which 10 varieties are grown: Parellada, Macabeo, Chardonnay and Tempranillo. Some of the grapes are still purchased outside, but the goal is to harvest them all here. One of its most emblematic wines is La Maca Beu (21.70 euros), which it has been producing since 2015. Its name is a play on words where in Catalan we read macabeo, macabeu(90%) and an ingenious label with a fly and a telephone number to refer to the moscato (10%), which allow you to provide more information about the wine without falling into irregularities. As the documentary tells it The meter label (2023), by Clara Isamat, producers and processors who are not part of any designation of origin nor benefit from certificates or seals, cannot include some basic information on their bottles, such as the grape varieties they contain or the municipality in which they produce if it belongs to a DO like Penedès.
New wines have been born from La Maca Beu, and at the moment the company, in which Arola is entirely involved, which holds 50% of it, has around twenty references. They are all made by hand and following the ancestral method in the case of sparkling wines, with spontaneous refermentation even in the bottle. Her distributor Joan Valencia, of Cuvee3000, calls her “a force of nature that transcends good and evil, with a talent like few others that travels halfway around the world.” That’s not an exaggeration. In addition to being a sommelier and viticulture teacher, she has worked in wineries in California, New Zealand and France, where she learned everything she wants to do and everything she doesn’t. One of his schools was the French Dagueneau winery, one of the best in sauvignon blanc, he points out, where he rubbed shoulders with Didier Dagueneau’s sons. “There I learned to work impeccably,” he recalls.
One of the wines that has brought him the most joy in recent times is Donna (30 euros), a bottle of sparkling wine with 100% Chardonnay grapes from a 1984 vineyard. It is located right outside his house and he admits that when he arrived he wasn’t expecting much from these forty-year-old vines. So it was a surprise, especially the 2023 vintage, for its good results. It is a direct pressing sparkling wine, with alcoholic fermentation with indigenous yeasts in Dammy oak barrels and final fermentation in the bottle on its own fine lees. “It’s brutal, it’s my fetish,” he says emphatically.
Now he waits for the moment of pruning, one of the moments he likes most because it means being in connection with the field. She acknowledges that “the cold is harsh,” but she really enjoys that “sense of silence and focus on what’s at hand, on planning for the new vintage.” What bothers him most is the bureaucracy, and he never misses an opportunity to regret that it is not suitable for small producers, who waste a lot of time and effort filling out forms. Luckily, he explains, it is something that Arola deals with, who is an architect by profession and has already developed many projects for the possibilities of Can Barceló. As the movement’s reference producer in Catalonia, which is also the region of Spain with the greatest presence of minimal intervention wines, Nuria Renom travels all over the world, participating in conferences and fairs. He was recently in Turin and New York.
No one said starting a winery was easy and things at Can Barceló Les Cantarelles are moving slowly, but they are moving forward. While waiting to pay off the credit deriving from the purchase of the farm in order to invest in the construction of rural accommodation, Nuria Renom sells around 18,000 bottles a year. Once they have the capacity to harvest the 16 hectares, they estimate they will be able to produce around 50,000. A figure they are already happy with because they don’t aspire to grow much, but rather to remain faithful to their philosophy. The grapes will continue to be harvested by hand, but the ideal would be to be able to transform them on the farm itself, an achievement that requires the restoration of the now dilapidated cellar.
Mas Guineu, a shared cellar
For the moment, winemaking is carried out a few kilometers further down, at Mas Guineu (Torrelles de Foix), a farm documented in 1574, surrounded by 170 hectares of vineyards which has a winery shared with small winemakers. There are currently about six projects, including the house one, and they all produce wine in an artisanal and natural way, without chemical additives. Nuria Renom arrived three years ago in this space which is 45 minutes away with her tractor, which she calls Raimunda. This winery was rehabilitated in the early 2000s and has several methods for fermenting wine: from 3,000-liter stainless steel tanks to several demijohns and his friend and neighbor Carles Llarch’s saddlebags, handcrafted only with clay extracted from the earth, free of any interference that could alter the natural fermentation process.
Years ago, companies like this made wine from all the grapes harvested, but industrialization and globalization have also taken away this archaic way of taking care of the fields in Penedès, a region that has 30,000 hectares of vineyards, which are mostly part of the Penedès DO, except for small projects like that of Nuria Renom which are run on their own. Precisely given the problems of labeling and identifying wines that are not part of a DO, the Gremi de Vinyataires Lliures was born in 2022, an organization to defend the interests of these wine artisans.
Against the current, but with coherence; Without additives, but with a lot of respect, Nuria Renom has become a reference winemaker who sells her products mainly in Catalonia and Spain, but also in the United States, Denmark and Japan. In Copenhagen there is no natural wine bar that does not have a bottle of this woman with clear ideas and an overwhelming character, who makes this way of making wine a path towards a life more aligned with nature, austere but pleasant. “Wine touches your heart and soul.” Its hedonistic character cannot be denied, even if one refuses to place it only in the category of alcoholic beverages. “Wine is the landscape of the earth,” she says, proud of her destiny. “Without a doubt we have found our place in the world,” say Nuria and Arola. The two had the feeling of arriving for the first time and realizing they had found what they were looking for. “I don’t want to do anything else, I have everything here,” concludes Nuria Renom. After traveling the world, his journey continues, but settling among these hills that are home to old and new vineyards. The past and present of wine, which meet again in your hands.
Gastro Special from ‘El País Semanal’
This report is part of the Gastro Special prepared by ‘El País Semanal’ and EL PAÍS Gastro.
