La Prats Wines, a rural suburban vineyard

Prats It’s one of those wines that expresses the suddenly vibrant Antigor. It’s one of those wines that makes people take notice. La Prats is the registered name of the vineyard. The vineyard is located in the middle of the Les Oliveres urban area, full of villas and single-family homes, on the outskirts of the municipality of Vilassar de Dalt (Maresme). A vineyard facing the sea and surrounded by almond trees interspersed with some pomegranates, three fig trees and two peach trees. It is an old, modest vineyard, with the air of a survivor. If it is still cultivated today it is because the owner Josep Carbonell did not want to sell it under any circumstances. Today it stands as an invaluable agricultural and cultural heritage. It is the first vineyard owned by a natural wine producer. Oriol Artigas Where did their first wine come from?

It is a vineyard planted in 1913, and has more than thirty grape varieties. The history of this vineyard is so unique that we will not spare any space: taking into account the replanting of the vines that has taken place over the years, the average age of the vines in this vineyard is close to sixty. It is characterized by having thirty grape varieties in common plantings. It is the concept of a vineyard. It was the Can Torradeta vineyard, in Vilassar de Dalt, that supplied this estate with wine for its own consumption throughout the year. La Prats has one hectare of vines. Most of the vines were planted to make wine, and a small part was dedicated to table grapes. This explains why the plot has so many varieties. 50% of the vines are white grapes, 15% are Sommol (black), 10% are Pere (black) and the rest has a predominance of white varieties (Macabeo, Grenache, Malvasia, Sant Jaume, Wald Soubirat, some hybrids, among others).

In 2012, Oriol Artigas sorted the white and red wines separately and found that the white wines were too rough in the mouth and the reds too thin. Logically, he came to the conclusion that the best wine to get from that vineyard was a royal wine, blending all the varieties, as had always happened at Can Turradita. With such a heterogeneous vineyard, with such a variety of varieties, which entailed such variation in the ripeness of the grapes, Oriol Artigas decided that the best way to express the wine was to harvest all the grapes on the same day and always on the same day: September 11 in the morning. It is therefore the harvest date, which is constant in this wine, that gives it regularity.

We asked Oriol Artigas how they currently make Prats, and he explained: “We put the grapes in it, we stomp on them without slipping under our feet, as if they were in a bowl, we leave them for thirty-six hours and we squeeze them. It doesn’t get muddled. It ferments spontaneously and stays that way until July or August, which is when we bottle it. La Prats production is very small.