Oriol Artigas La Rumbera Pansa Blanca Alella 2022 750ml

Winemaker Description 

Origin Alella, Catalunya.

Varieties 100% Pansa Blanca

From 7 vineyards around Alella, all planted on Saulò (granitic sand) aty 120-300m. The vines were planted between 1939 and 1998.

Vinification Method The grapes were harvested by hand and half were destemmed and crushed by foot, then left to macerate on the skins for 3-4 days; the other half were destemmed, left whole, and macerated on the skins for 9 days. The two parts were pressed and finished fermentation in stainless steel tanks and fiberglass, then rested for 11 months on
the lees in the same vessels. 

Bottled without fining, filtering, or added sulfur. Oriol Artigas, an Alella native and trained enologist, started his project of making non- interventionist wines in 2011. His over-arching philosophy is to “cultivate the vineyards in the most natural and least interventionist way possible, to allow the grapes to express in the most intense way the landscape from which they come.”

He works about 12 hectares in total, mostly of old vines. He allows vegetation to grow between the vines, prunes very little, and works the vineyards primarily along the lunar calendar. In the winery, fermentations are completely spontaneous, aging is primarily done in steel vats, and sulfur is never used at any point in his process. The vineyards of Alella are essentially the vineyards of Barcelona, located just north of the city along the coast of the Mediterranean. 

The primary soil type is a kind of white granite, locally called Sauló, and the main grape grown here is Pansa Blanca (the local clone of Xarel- lo) with a whole slew of other grape varieties inter-planted as well.