►Garrett’s Blog from our trip to Cisteller
Perhaps the most incredible thing to come from our first meeting with Sergi Canals and Jessica Madigan of Cisteller came from something of an aside, while the group was still forming around us. Jessica, an American, met Sergi - native to Penedes - in what was for each of them their first class at UC Davis. Paired up as lab partners, their very first assignment should’ve been easy, but they failed - miserably. The task? To ruin a wine with bacteria. The resulting wine was glorious. To say it was the last thing they failed is fair, as each curveball they’ve been thrown since has only elevated their collective curiosity and obvious talent.
The couple began envisioning their joint project around 2018, in the midst of their year-round traversing of the globe, regularly working a harvest in each hemisphere annually. Jessica recalled working in Burgundy, Central Otago and the Willamette, thinking the whole time that Pinot Noir & Chardonnay was their destiny. Sergi’s personal pull to Penedes remained; Jessica admits, “He seduced me with blueprints.” An idea was born, though neither of them had fully grasped the idea in totality.
What they found in Penedes was a region in crisis, the grapegrowing community weighed down with what Sergi & Jessica dubbed an “industrial hangover.” Having learned in a formal school, and following that with tints at some of the most prestigious winemaking regions, the duo spoke of the way Pinot Noir producers “manicured” their grapes; Penedes, meanwhile, was historically “rough” on the grapes - the vines and berries were largely mistreated either by chemicals or poor technique. Luckily, Sergi’s family had planted vineyards in what Sergi dubbed “Mountain land that nobody wanted”, a lucky stroke because it was far away from the more commercialized, high-yielding vineyards. What they found in the vineyards shocked them both, given their travels: the soils were incredibly similar to Chablis and parts of Champagne - low pH and rife with limestone and soft marls.
”We started from the ground-up, building a new winery in 2019; the originally intention was to make still wines,” Jessica admits. “We said, let’s pick green grapes, keep it neutral and see what comes.” The couple conducted three (non-released) trial harvests over the following three vintages, and quickly came to the realization that they “had” to make sparkling, not only their still wines. Though they had proven to be open to adaptation, they knew which form of Spanish sparkling wines they did not want to make.
”Corpinnat” translates to the “Heart of Penedes”. What started as a group of rebels, who faced ten years of pushback from the government, now stands today as the region’s answer to Champagne’s “Special Club”. Corpinnat is not just a brand, it is a collective of aligned ideals. “You must be voted in,” Sergi explains, “And it’s a strict auditing process.” The administrators would stop by unannounced twice during harvest to ensure every single grape was harvested by hand and the wines entirely produced on-site. What seemed punitive and limiting, Jessica admits, was Corpinnar “Effectively re-configuring the reality, as far as Corpinnat versus Cava.”
Thus, in 2024, Cisteller was inducted into the realm of Corpinnat, the thirteenth member of what is now a 21-winery society. Those who had rebelled against Cava to allow them to include terms like “Recoltant Manipulant” now had their own DO (Official Spanish Appellation: “District of Origin”) that provided rules not of typicity of taste, but typicity of quality. Truly motivated by this honor and swift change to their missive, Jessica & Sergi realized just how far they had come from attempting to ruin a wine; they now had a responsibility to land that they called their own, and to a group that set about to bring tremendous quality and notoriety to Spain’s wine scene. “We ended up throwing out all of our lessons,” Jessica claims, shaking her head. “They were standing in the way of true expression.” Expression of the land they’d inherited, expression of their talent, expression of themselves.
”Cisteller” translates to “Basket Weaver”, an homage to Sergi’s ancestors’ trade. Today, as they farm great-grandfather’s vineyards, Jessica and Sergi work the grapes by hand with their two children in tow, weaving their own new traditions, re-writing - but not forgetting - every lesson they’d ever been taught.
VITICULTURE & VINIFICATION
Of the twenty hectares inherited from Sergi’s family, ten are planted - some were removed due to severe drought. Xarel-Lo, they say, has adapted to the soils and the elevation best. The vineyards sit about 300 meters above sea level, and the grape seems perfectly suited to the chalk-rich soils. One of the benefits of the soils, as alluded to earlier, is the pH; there’s also a relative absence of malic acid in the climate, meaning the wines naturally avoid malo-lactic conversion while in barrel or tank - this keeps with their original intentions to avoid manipulating their wines as much as possible. With the ample sunlight, harvest is usually done by the first week in September, again highlighting the intent to preserve freshness, rather than overtly ripe flavors.
With much ado about the sparkling wines, Jessica & Sergi admit that the still wines are “still evolving”; while we found them eye-opening and certainly texturally & flavor-wise they will appeal to many of our fans, the couple admit there is a “complicated relationship” between the two types of wines. The sparkling and the still wines are thus treated very much like two different “faces” for Cisteller to project, and the differing labels reflect just that.
Jessica & Sergi’s original intentions to create transparent, delicious still wines still came to fruition. The freshness and low pH provided by the soils allows them to eschew the use of sulfur at bottling, The vision for the still wines is to utilize mostly single-vineyard, single-varietal bottlings, allowing each piece of terroir to show its uniqueness. Xarel-Lo (and its strain Xarel-lo Vermell), Macabeu, Manzoni Blanco and an ancient, back-from-the dead strain of Malvasia are all utilized to show different prisms of the terroir. The Malvasia was nearly extinct, but survived in one tiny plot in the region. Vinification-wise, there’s a touch of sulfur in barrel, and the fermentations are all commenced by use of a pied de cuvee (a starter created with a small batch of the same grapes from the same vineyards). The labels for the still wines come from a tile in the family’s basket traditional basket shop.
For the sparkling wines, at this time they are all single-varietal productions, using either Xarel-Lo or Garnacha. Grenache, Sergi claims, is “Perfect” for sparkling wines - they harvest the grapes before they have completed full veraison, and though there is no maceration, they possess a crunchy red fruit, with “Wild purity,” per Sergi.
Xarel-Lo, Jessica explains, “Is a poor comparison to Chardonnay, even though it can be versatile like Chardonnay, and it also handles oak aging very well. It’s aromatically more subtle, and the potential is there for texture.” They quickly press the juice off of the skins to preserve the freshness, though the remainder of the solids are preserved for the aging process. Prior to secondary fermentations, all wines intended for sparkling are put through a cold stabilization, as tartrates can cause issues with the secondary fermentations. A minimum one year elevage is their rule prior to tirage - they are experimenting with Burgundy barrels for longer elevage and have loved the results thus far.
”We think it’s one of the best areas in the world to make sparkling wines,” Sergi claims. Jessica adds, “What [the Cava producers] got wrong was not the method - it was everything else.” Cisteller’s goal is to showcase not style, but that the typicity of terroir is more important. Through our time with Sergi & Jessica, what we could easily interpret was not an arrogance or sense of superiority; they referenced several other producers, not only whose wines they had enjoyed, but also their spirits - “Often they had an adversarial relationship with the ‘regime,’ “ was one way Jessica put it. “We’re outsiders here, in a way, and had to conduct plenty of trial & error. We’re not following Champagne rules - we aren’t into long autolysis, we don’t add sulfur to our Blanc de Noirs, for instance. But yet,” she continues, “We’re trying to keep all of the material from the harvest,” alluding to the preservation of the solids, and not racking any more than the gravity flow from the press to the tanks or barrel. With all of these facets - the pH, the solids, and the natural acidity - neither sulfur or dosage is needed at all, and the wines achieve perfect balance.
