Toni Puerma and Lluís Arias make natural wine at Clos Costela, a small estate in Les Llambardes, high in the mountains of Penedès, Catalonia. We sent Toni our Meet the Winemaker questions. Everything below in "I" and "we" is his own answer, translated from Spanish and kept as close to his words as we could.
"Honestly, I still don't know"
When did I know I'd make wine for a living? Honestly, I still don't know. We don't make a living from it. But we feel a real passion for transforming grapes and making wine, and the same passion for the land around us and for nature.
Clos Costela is a small project in the highest mountains of Penedès. Our winery sits in Les Llambardes, where the forests of the Serra d'Ancosa surround the vineyards and the vineyards surround the forests. We love our land and our space. We also love our pets, our free-range chickens, our vegetables and, of course, our grapes.
At 6am during harvest, you smell grass. You feel nerves. You hear animals... and the odd yawn!
What you never see
The hardest part is having to sell our wine by word of mouth alone, through a handful of very specific sales efforts. Controlling eeeeverything in the process, and fitting all of that around everything else in life. The passion for all of it helps make up for it.
There are always difficult moments. Depending on others, and living alongside them, is hard. But you always lift your head again. Costs keep rising, and we believe we have to adjust our prices, although price fairness isn't always the same for everyone. And sometimes a good customer has turned into a big debtor.
What keeps us going is uncorking a bottle, tasting our wine, and knowing there are always good people beside us to share it with.
The falcon overhead
Every year one species or plant wins out over another. Every year is different. But where we are, seeing the falcon flying overhead is especially interesting, even if it doesn't strictly have to do with the vines.
We practise regenerative agriculture, which connects us with nature and its cycles. Still, because of where we are, the altitude and above all the rainfall, sometimes we have to till the soil more instead of leaving a cover of plants.
What makes us nervous
Our wines are all natural, so how they evolve is always something we wait for. What makes us most nervous are the ancestrals, the wines our customers love and value most, and how our wine keeps evolving once it's in the bottle.
The wines: natural, high-altitude, no added sulphites
From the Vivan team. Clos Costela's vineyard sits around 600m up, planted with Catalan grapes you rarely see outside Penedès, Xarel·lo, Sumoll and Macabeu, alongside some Merlot. Clos Costela is certified organic by CCPAE, the Catalan organic body. The grapes are picked by hand into small boxes and fermented spontaneously with the vineyard's own native yeasts. Whites get a short skin contact in stainless steel; other wines rest and evolve slowly in oak, and the winter cold does the stabilising. Every bottle is unfined, unfiltered and made with no added sulphites.
The result is natural wine with real mountain freshness: the Forat Blanc and Clos Costela 23 whites built on Xarel·lo, the Forat Negre red from Merlot and Sumoll, the CÍNIC orange wine, and La Llambarda, a pét-nat made by the ancestral method. It's bottled before the first fermentation finishes, with no added sugar, so the bubbles come from the grapes alone. That's one of the ancestrals Toni gets nervous about. See all Clos Costela wines.
Like a trip you never repeated
I chose Vivan because of Greg, and because of the cooperative project itself, which is something I believe in. What's changed is how quickly and easily we communicate now, and I'm really grateful for that.
When I'm no longer making wine, I simply want people to remember it. Like that trip they once took and never repeated.
And to whoever opens one of our boxes: here you'll find love and passion.
Every Clos Costela bottle on Vivan is packed by Toni and Lluís and shipped straight from their cellar in Les Llambardes. Meet Clos Costela and their wines.
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