Fauna y Flor 2022

Nuria Renom was born in Buenos Aires, but since her father is Catalan, she studied at the University of Barcelona, and she was one step away from being a veterinary doctor. While a student, she spent a semester in Tuscany through the Erasmus Programme, and there she was acquainted with and fell head over heels in love with something whose flame will never be extinguished: wine.

In 2008 Nuria started to study to become a sommelier, but took a break to travel and work on the vintages in regions as diverse as the United States, New Zealand, and France, deepening her relationship with the vineyards, feeling the importance of the ecosystem in the winemaking process. She finally returned to Barcelona in 2012 to teach at the Hospitality Academy and with a dream of making wine, but fate had reserved for her a different gateway to the Catalan wine scene: the now mythical Bar Brutal. Nuria took on the role of its sommelier from the very first moment, contributing immensely to the consolidation of this natural wine bar into one of the most iconic in the world.

In 2014, while working both as a professor and a sommelier, Nuria managed to rent half an acre of a vineyard with merlot and syrah, thus beginning the production of her own wine, with all the work being done manually. Starting in 2015 she started to buy grapes from local growers she admired most and expanded her production.

In 2021 a huge change in Nurias’s life occurred when she purchased a property that not only included an old house that needed to be restored, but also included goblet vines, some planted more than eighty years ago, mostly of parellada, but also of macabeu and other varieties. As a self-confessed lover of sparkling wines, Nuria considered the geological setting of this property to be fundamental to her choice, as it is located in the municipality of Saint Martí Sarroca, in the Sierra Prelitoral, a limestone massif of Jurassic origin (150 million years old), which, being at an altitude of 420 meters and having a northern exposure, allows the grapes to ripen longer and consequently preserve acidity, a fundamental characteristic of Nuria’s philosophy of both still and ancestral wines.

In her daily work in the vineyard, Nuria seeks above all to value the land and its fruit, and to work the vines with the utmost respect. Perhaps under the influence of her experience as a sommelier – where she had to seize the customer’s ideia of wine in order to propose him a wine that met his expectations –, Nuria always tries to “listen” to what the healthy grapes coming into the winery are trying to tell her, which means to say, she tries to understand what is the right way for the grapes to express their own character and identity. As Nuria says, “I try to talk to the plants and ask them: what do you want to be?”