Cosmic Vinyaters

Salvador Batlle Barrabieg wants one thing on your mind when you think of his wines: his deep respect for the environment where he grows his grapes. Working in two very different Catalan region —Alt Emporda (the village of Agullana) and Baix Penedès (the village Sierra de Montmell)—his focus is on the purest possible expression of the varietals, crafting wines with low intervention and the utmost reverence for the land, which he tends with patience and passion.

Salvador grew up in Baix Penedes, where his family works on 22 hectares of vineyards, and started making wine in his late teens. After studying viticulture, agriculture, solar energy, and winemaking, he decamped to New Zealand for a year, returning to his family’s home in 2012 and realizing his path forward with winemaking lay elsewhere.

In 2013, he found a cellar in Agullana, in the Empordá, 15 minutes from the French border, that came with a few hectares of vines. His vineyards there sit at 250-350 meters above sea level, a mere 20 kilometers from the sparkling Mediterranean Sea. All 6.5 hectares are farmed according to stringent biodynamic practices and his focus is on local grape varieties Garnacha and Carinyena. In Baix Penedès, he manages four hectares of Cabernet Franc and Sumoll vines on compact clay and limestone soils on his family’s estate and works closely with their neighbor Joan and her 80-year-old Macabeo vines. In both locales, his vineyards are exclusively dry-farmed and the grapes are all hand-harvested.

In the cellar, Salvador prefers to work with amphorae for both fermentation and aging and tends to avoid longer (or any) stints in oak. He exclusively crafts single varietal wines and accentuates his technical work preserving the purest expressions of the grapes in amphora with energetic cleansing, sacred geometry, and sound vibrations. The result of his unconventional efforts are delicate and fresh natural wines that are an embodiment of combining his agricultural practices and farmer/grower background with a cosmic energy that is greater than the self.

https://cosmic.cat/