Mendall in Terra Alta

I was feeling guilty about being late. But Chris was green and sick and we were...late. He was gracious. We zoomed to his vines, nearby. I let the boys ride in the big JPmobile. I hitched with Laureano. We needed to talk. I really wanted to know how he arrived to this place--ultra -extreme, hardcore in Terra Alta. Truly hardcore natural. Wound up Laureano has a nervous energy and completely endearing quality that infuses his bottles. You might not have tasted the wines, so you'll have to see for yourself, but you'll get the idea in this loosely edited transcript. ++ I started to make wine and for three years I made with sulfur. A friend made liquid for me. I don't like the sulfur. You add it and the wine changes. After, the wine recouperates and it works well. But at the beginning it goes Ouaaa. (hands go out like a bat wings for emphasis) First you have a live color...then it's not live anymore. You make sulfur the color is dead. It comes back. Yes. The wine comes back, but I don't like. One day I read an article that said it was possible to make wine without it. This was 2004, without knowing anyone in France, just with internet, I find out it's possible. Then Benoit from Anima de Vi comes to see me. He comes and says, you work without sulfur! Do you know in France there's a movement! He puts be in touch with Puzelat. This man from the Netherlands, Herman, that beautiful pereson, he says you have a lot of friends in France. Ouaaa (hands fling out the side, bat-like.) He told me I have to go to Remise. This was December 2005. I go there and I drink and then I drive home after the wines? No trouble. After I go to Auvergne and to the Jura to Overnoy. I go with a full car. With me are Giles Azonni, Axel Prufferm Pfifferling. Frenchie! WHOWHOWHOWHO! We go to Overnoy for a meeting. Overnoy! First moment? He makes Bread. He makes bread! And I like bread. I love bread. He takes me to crack nuts and eat bread. Pierre Overnoy. This is my first moment. It's good. Sometimes I see a respect that is not necessary. But Overnoy? Ouaaa! Five-minutes later, we arrived in Finca Caibelles, in Pinell. Once it started, night swooped fast. The sky was impossibly blue and heart stirring. We drove back to taste Well, we didn't have a corkscrew. (thanks to Keven of FarmWine for the documentation) and I was thinking how Laureano came to his specific no sulfur platform without any knowledge of Chauvet, without knowledge of Neauport, without knowledge that there were many like-minded individuals in the world. It was as if the small neonatal movement in Spain invented itself. There is no method. Like Jordi, like Oriol, these folk found their own way. To this group of winemakers, sulfur here is the devil.