Cisteller Xarel-lo 2023

Cisteller is the project of young couple Jessica Madigan and Sergi Canals but like many of the great wineries of modern Spain the heart of the winery is its relationship to the past. Cisteller is based on the Canals family farm, an agricultural estate that has been in the family since the 1920s when the family moved to Cataluna from Aragon in the hope of a better life. The Canals were ‘Cistellers,’ Basket Weavers, and the farm’s primary function was to provide esparto grass for weaving. Although like all traditional family farms the grass was interspersed with vines and other subsistence crops. 

Penedes in those days was a sort of bucolic ideal, rolling hills, a gentle Mediterranean climate, abutted but national parks to the south and west and Barcelona only a short distance to the east. Starting in the 1970s mass industrialization of Cataluna changed that landscape radically. The government sliced huge ‘polygons’ out of Penedes and earmarked them for heavy industry. These in turn had to be linked via rail and heavy roads. Basket-weaving became unsustainable as cheaper labour outside of Europe undercut the local products. Most of the Canals’ estate was replanted to vineyards, the farming of which in turn was industrialised by the sprawling international success of cheap Cava from the 1980s onward. In fairness, there was significant upside to this process: the industrialization of Penedes was the major driver of Cataluna’s economic success and it made Cataluna the most economically successful state in Spain. But it left many of the locals with a deep seeded sense of nostalgic loss.

Armed with degrees in agriculture, enology and chemistry from U.C. Davis in California where Sergi and Jessica had met, the newlywed couple returned to take over the family farm in 2019. Since graduating they’d crisscrossed the globe completing vintages in the southern and northern hemispheres, but the return meant a deeper commitment to agriculture and farming, not just wine making. It meant a return to organics and converting the estate to biodynamics in such a way that required more than just a monocrop of vines to be grown on the property. All their vineyards are now certified organic, all of their wines are exclusively made from their own vines. It also meant confronting the very real and very dramatic effects that climate change was having on the farm – their second vintage was done in the worst drought conditions in Penedes on record. But what they did have was important; 20 hectares of traditional Catalan varietals, old vineyards that may not have been farmed organically but had been cared for lovingly by Sergi’s parents. And a dense calcareous subsoil that gave a natural tension to their wines. It’s this soil that’s the starting place for their style of clarity and tension, always made naturally but always seeking precision.