LUCY CHILVERS
CATALUNYA (SPAIN) EL PENEDES
We're delighted to have new wines from Lucy Chilvers, direct from her project in the hills of El Penedès.
These are the next round of wines from her 2023 vintage - a third consecutive year of drought in Catalunya - nonetheless producing wines of great tension and finesse. Sourced from Lucy's 4.5 hectares of old indigenous vines around the surrounding hills, fruit is farmed organically, worked very gently in the cellar, and bottled with no additions.
Photos are from our beautiful visit to Lucy in October 2024 - now located in the picturesque village of El Bardoc, dining outside the 400-year-old cellar Lucy has been lucky enough to find. A long table stretched across the courtyard: cheese, pan con tomate, peppers & aubergine from her garden, iberico salami, chorizo - and the crowing achievement - Lucy's moussaka.
(This was also the introduction of Lucy's iconic macrame glass holders - red, orange, green, violet, and for the serious, black.)
In this tranche we have the following:
Toca'M is her ancestral sparkling of direct-pressed Sumoll, picked at 400m - wild strawberry & lemon rind with a profoundly mineral line, great saline tension.
Sasa is a very special wine for Lucy - and the first time we've received it - named for her mentor Sasa Radikon, it's the result of a 3 week maceration of 100 year old Xarel•lo. Completists among you will be pleased to know this is the press juice from the same maceration whose free-run juice creates Flor De Maeve. Aged in one 225l chestnut barrel for 6 months, Sasa is incredibly gastronomic, complex and long. Fleshy stone fruit and herbal lift tethered by a tightly wound grip of tannin. Beautiful balance.
El Nen Sam, another of Lucy's longer-aged wines, is the result of a 9 day carbonic maceration of 30 year old Merlot aged in old French oak barrel for 14 months - a real dance between vibrant, electric fruit and the gentle, earthy structure of its upbringing. Opens beautifully, one we can't wait to be drinking with pretty much anything pulled off a hot grill this summer.
Visiting Lucy, it's clear the commitment to this project is deeply linked wth her commitment to hospitality - Lucy's raison d'être is that of a caregiver - of people, of vines.
At the end of our long lunch as the moussaka settles and music unfolds; cigarettes are rolled, neighbourhood cats join for strokes and Fernando naps on the gravel. A surprisingly moreish corrective of coffee & baileys breathes life into the group.
We climb the hill behind the cellar, passing a parcel of Xarel•lo that will soon be Lucy's to tend. Crunching through drought-cracked clay, we ascend to a picturesque garden vineyard of goblet vines. A parcel of old vine Sumoll Blanc - a project Lucy intends to take cuttings from, to graft and replant new vines from her massale selection - regenerating a forgotten vineyard (she has already done much work to tame and prune this abandoned parcel) to prove the worth of the variety - helping make her stamp on the region, paying it back to the locals who have taken her in.
13 - October 2024
