Alt Penedès · Catalunya
NISSAGA
MERINERO
Minimal intervention wines
250
Nissaga Merinero is a family-owned winery driven by two brothers in the heart of a farmhouse with more than two hundred and fifty years of history, where wine was already being made. The farmhouse, located in the Alt Penedès region, the birthplace of sparkling wines and wines, was created with the goal of taking you back to the essence of traditional Catalan farmhouse life.
In 2000, winemaking ceased on the estate due to the pressure exerted by large wineries making bulk grape purchases. Slowly, the farmers shifted from producing wine to focusing exclusively on growing grapes. Nineteen years later, Nissaga Merinero seeks to revive this simple and natural way of making wine. Ours is a small winery, about one hundred square meters, that has aimed to preserve the spirit of those days, putting the product at the center rather than marketing. In short, the wines of Nissaga Merinero are wines to be shared with family and friends.
Our vineyards are more than twenty-five years old, some even reaching sixty. This gives our wines a very distinct and personal character. The varieties, xarel·lo, macabeo, and parellada in whites, and merlot and garnacha in reds, rest on predominantly clay-limestone soils.
Our farming is based on organic certification principles. Vineyard tasks also reflect our approach: precise, timely tasks, doing no more than necessary. We leave plant cover, as this encourages biodiversity and life in the vineyard, and helps us defend against future pests. By minimizing intervention in our lands, we ensure quality over productivity.
Harvesting is a labor-intensive process that we carry out by hand; the vineyards surround the winery, and being just three minutes away by tractor ensures that the quality of our product is not compromised by the long waiting times at large winery reception areas, thus avoiding oxidation of the grapes.
The grapes picked in the morning are immediately processed at the winery, where they are de-stemmed and placed in maceration tanks. Fermentation begins spontaneously with native yeasts and without temperature control. In some cases, we do macerations of two weeks, and in others, months, depending on what we desire at the moment. We try not to follow a strict and repetitive winemaking pattern each season, as every year is different in terms of production, ripening, weather, etc. A wine identical to previous years can never be made, it’s impossible, and we let nature lead the way. After maceration, the grapes are pressed and transferred a couple of times to stainless steel tanks to remove the lees and will not be touched again until bottling.
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A small production allows us to carefully attend to every step of the winemaking process and maintain control over the entire process. The result is a natural wine (vi natural) made with minimal intervention, one that aims to transport us to the table of the Catalan farmhouse of our ancestors.
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Verema · Alt Penedès
