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Els Vinyerons
Penedès, Catalonia, Spain6 wines3.8 avg
51
Penedès, Catalonia. Amós Bañeres (pharmacist turned natural winemaker) and Alex Ruiz Masachs (from a Cava family) working roughly 10 hectares. Zero-sulphite, insect-named cuvées - Pregadéu ancestral Xarel·lo, Lluerna, Saltamartí.
Els Vinyerons is a two-person Penedès project, not the three-winemaker collective sometimes described in other places. Amós Bañeres - a former pharmacist who came to wine through viticulture studies in Tarragona and has made his own wines under the Amós Bañeres label since 2011 - joined forces with Alex Ruiz Masachs, who came out of a family of conventional Cava producers and brought roughly 10 hectares of family vineyard into the project. The intent was accessible, terroir-driven, clean natural wine at a price point that could bring conventional drinkers across.
The cellar is at Cal Banyeres in Sant Martí Sarroca, and the parcels are scattered across Alt Penedès - Vilafranca, La Munia, Font-Rubí, Pacs del Penedès, Sant Martí Sarroca - on a mix of sandy loam, calcareous marl and limestone, some plots strewn with fossilised oysters. Organic farming on the Els Vinyerons side (biodynamic on Amós's solo label); hand-harvest, wild ferment, no industrial oenological products, unfined, unfiltered, zero added sulphites.
Grapes are the Penedès set: Xarel·lo the anchor, with Macabeu, Garnacha, Tempranillo, and smaller mentions of Sumoll, Mandó and Trepat in blends. The cuvée names are insects living in the organic vineyards - Pregadéu ("praying mantis"), an ancestral-method 100% Xarel·lo sparkling with 18 months on lees; Lluerna ("firefly"), a still 100% Xarel·lo, sometimes in old 300L French oak; Saltamartí ("grasshopper"), a Tempranillo / Garnacha red. The style across the range is the interesting thing: deliberately clean for a zero-sulphite house, saline and fresh rather than funky, positioned as a bridge into the genre.
