CIMS DE PORRERA

Let’s go to Cims… A project which dates back to the year 1996, when Josep Lluís Pérez experimented in Mas Martinet with hundreds of different options for maceration, alcohol content, varieties… And he discovered the Carinyena, the old Carinyena. After considering different options, he eventually ended up in Porrera, in the Cooperative, with Lluís Llach. The agreement: buy half of the harvest at 50 pts. per kilo of grapes, and the commitment to help them vinify the other half in order to sell it in bulk at weekends. The beginning. A couple of years later, they bought the whole harvest of the 35 vine growers who made up the Cooperative. A big challenge.

Now they are 20/22 vine growers. The wines: the Clàssic, Cims de Porrera, but also the red and white wines Vi de Vila and the Finques.

Wanting to see the development of the Carinyena, a barrel from each state was bottled from the very beginning. 100% old Carinyena. Now, instead of the father, there is his son, Adrià Pérez, and his cousin, Marc Pérez. And, instead of Lluís Llach, there is Perelada.

However, the most important thing is that the social project continues, the work with different vine growers, different ways of working, different varieties, different areas, different orientations. “A diversity that we love and on which we do not want to have any influence (…) everyone does as much as he/she can and has his/her own fears” says Adrià when he talks to us about the project.

Marc and Adrià do not believe in rankings, classifications, labels, ratings… They make wine because they like drinking it, so they make the wine that they like: aged, mature wine. “Here, everyone wanted to extract. And the Carinyena, even if you extract as much grapes as you can (…) they have more depth, they go unnoticed” tells us Marc, when he talks about 2004 and the reason why they stopped bringing wines to the main guides of the sector. Therefore, in 2005 they decided to change the Cims de Porrera and turn it into a 100% Carinyena wine. It had been called Clàssic because it was the picture of what they found in the vineyard, and they had decided to be faithful to it. For this reason, the harvest and the winemaking were done at the same time. “In 2004 we already separated the Garnatxa and we started to do tests with the harvested Garnatxa much earlier, and we fell in love with it!” says Adrià. They decided to raise the price of the Garnatxa so that the vine growers would come earlier on purpose, because this way “the Garnatxa stands the coolness, it has a lower pH, the alcohol content is still high (…) but…” this was their commitment, tells us Marc.

This is how the Garnatxa was born. The Cims could be changed, and with this change the possibility to age it more came too, because the Carinyena stands acidity, coolness.

And now, they are trying to encourage vine growers to change their way of working in the vineyard for an environmentally friendlier one. But it is complicated, so they have started to work a state themselves, the state of El Molí. With cover, working on the soil… “The state looks beautiful” says Marc, who is in love with it. And it can be an example for other people.

It is just like in the winery, where they have changed their way of working introducing concrete, demijohns…, shorter ageing periods, but longer ageing inside the bottle: Vi de Vila 2/3 years, Garnatxa 4 years, Cims 6 years and the Finques, 15 years. Working in the winery in the most environmentally friendly way possible with the minimum total amount of sulphur dioxide.

This is the way… going to find the most natural thing, they tell us. And they do it in a unique location: the restored mills of the old Cooperative in which today there are demijohns, barrels and bottles waiting to see the light of day at the right time.

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