Producer Celler de les Aus, Alta Alella

SPAIN,PENEDES

In 1991 Josep Maria Pujol-Busquets and his wife Cristina Guillén took over the Can Genís company in Alella, a town in the immediate Catalan hinterland, a few kilometers north of Barcelona, ​​and five minutes from the sea. The hilly vineyards, immersed in the Serralada de Marina Natural Park, had been planted 60 years earlier, after the Second World War. Josep Maria and Cristina (now assisted by their daughters Mireia and Georgina) support the old strains with new plantings of native Catalan varieties: Pansa Blanca and Mataró. The approach is clear from the beginning: certified organic farming, in a natural environment that is almost free from pathological pressures (downy mildew appears once a decade). The particular terroir of permeable granite sands (sauló) is particularly healthy. Some plots can thus boast of not receiving any phytosanitary treatment of any kind. For others, copper, sulfur and a strictly organic protocol. The harvest is obviously manual. The "Celler de les Aus" (Bird Cellar) is the most uncompromising sector of the company, in which 5 hectares of vineyard produce wines that are not only organic, but also without added sulphites. Alta Alella was, since 2006, the first Cava producer to avoid any addition of sulfur dioxide. The alcoholic fermentation occurs spontaneously, with indigenous yeasts, and the sparkling wine production is entrusted to the ancestral method. No final dosage, to maintain the original expression of the wine intact.