Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Eduard Morell, owner and founder of Vinyes del Terrer.

Vinyes del Terrer is a family winery located in Vila-Seca, Tarragona, where with a Mediterranean climate and its particular Lumaquela soil, they produce Mediterranean-style wines and, what is most important, with a sense of place.

Good afternoon Eduard, first of all thank you very much for serving us, we would like you to tell us a little about the history of the winery and what led you to make wine in this area.

First of all, thank you very much for inviting me to be the winemaker of the month at Enjoywine, it is a pleasure for me. The winery began with a dream in the countryside, we are country people who in 1989 planted the first vines on a farm that already belonged to my great-grandfather and after 14 years of care, we decided to make wine. The result was very positive, the character of the grapes was expressed from the first moment and that was a tremendous incentive that has carried us to this day.

If there is something that stands out from your vineyards, it is the Lumaquela soil. What is this soil like and what is special about it?

This soil is the origin of the character that I was telling you about, the wines always had that earthy, salty and sharp imprint that wines have. The soil stands out for its calcic character with a lot of carbonate and limestone, all with the stamp of embedded marine fossils that show us the marine part of that soil, the origin of all these properties.

With seven hectares of vineyards, you produce a wide range, made up of white, red, rancid and sweet wines typical of the area. What are you trying to express with each of them?

Let me tell you that we started making red wines, it was after a few years that we encouraged ourselves with whites and later we made this tribute to the world of sweet and rancid wines so historically recognized in the Tarragona area. Go ahead, the common denominator is to make wines that have this very marked marine and Mediterranean character. You feel that proximity to the sea when you taste our wines. Specifically, the objective of the reds is to be able to transfer this sensation of freshness through the wines; Terrer has a wilder part that we love and that we let it be a more direct and frank wine than Nus, where we are going to focus much more on the elegance and finesse of a salty Garnacha. As for the whites, the two are very antagonistic, luckily, the Macabeo, as you know, does not come from our own vineyard in Vila-seca, but from an old vineyard in the interior part of the province of Tarragona, where we look for a lot of expression in nose –something atypical in the variety itself- and with that opulent mouthfeel, but at the same time elegant and fresh – house brand. Nus Blanc is the most difficult wine to make, the one that has cost us the most to find that special expression it has, the idea is to show that the terroir goes beyond the varietal and to be able to drink a Sauvignon Blanc made 2 kilometers from the sea with a lot of elegance. As for the sweet and the rancid, as I was saying, it is a tribute to Tarragona, to those wines that one day were a flag throughout the world. A natural sweet with very little sugar that ends up expressing the salty terroir of the lumaquela and a rancio made in the sun and serenity as in the past, the maximum expression of the rancios from the beginning of the last century.

 Working with international grape varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Sauvignon Blanc, what characteristics do you think your wines have compared to other areas famous for growing these vines?

Basically it is about what I told you in the previous answer, a clear example that in certain terroirs, the character of the soil goes above the varietal, in our case the wines taste of calcareous soil with various nuances, but the column vertebral is the mineral character. In addition, in the case of Cabernet, it gives the wine a longevity that is very typical of the varietal and as for Sauvignon Blanc, it has a fragility that is also very typical of Sauvignon.

Making quality wine without the backing of a great denomination behind it is always a double merit. What is the key to being able to make a living from wine in lesser-known areas such as Vila Seca?

There are several keys, without a doubt persistence and stubbornness are the first, but immediately after comes the team of people behind this winery, people who have been by our side for many years and who have helped us work with methodology and with clear objectives.

Finally, a question for our readers, what wine would you advise to drink on these cold winter evenings and what would you accompany it with?

With so much cold I would eat any legume with a spoon, and I would accompany it with an old white wine now that they are beginning to be more and more appreciated. A Blanc del Terrer 2016 or a Nus del Terrer Blanc 2016 can be the perfect company.