Finca La Despeinada
Alex, Petra y Olivia,
Alex grew up in the South of France and learned his trade from the great Jean-Baptiste Dutheil of Château Sainte Anne in Bandol. In his 20s, he set off backpacking across Latin America and encountered his companion Petra, a fellow free-spirit, born in Austria. When the couple returned to Europe they chose Terra Alta.
Since 2016 they lived on a farm in Bot and are dedicated to viticulture and the production of natural wines. Their first vintage was 2017. They work 4 hectares of fairly old vines (between 20 and 80 years old), some on the farm where they live and others between Bot and Gandesa.
They carry out all the work in the field and in the winery to accompany the process, from pruning to putting the label. Its vision is to work the field with the utmost respect for the biodiversity, life and health of the soil. They spend a lot of time in the field, doing the work by hand, they try to enter very little with their small tractor (they generally plow only once in late spring and enter with the tractor at harvest). They do not use fertilizers or other chemicals on their fields.
They share the dream of permaculture, that agriculture is the conscious design of landscapes that mimic the patterns and relationships of nature. They have the dream of regenerating the lands we work so that they remain alive and fertile for the generations that follow us. In the winery they work naturally, that is, we only use grapes for their wines, they do not have added sulfites, chemical acids or artificial aromas. The native yeast is in charge of fermentation, they do not add industrial yeasts, they do not control the temperature and they do not clarify or filter the wine, they like live wines.
They seek to make wines that transmit emotions and make us happy. They work a lot by hand and taking advantage of gravity. They produce a maximum of 10,000 bottles/year.