La Salada

Toni Carbó and Ramón Jané, both born and raised in Penedès, Catalonia, have been friends since they were 15 years old. They both grew up among the vines, as did their fathers and grandfathers. Their parents and grandparents sold grapes to big companies in the area, big wine producers who turned them into bulk wines and cava for export. Ramón and Toni started working in their parents’ vineyards after completing their studies in Oenology. From 2002, they turned their restlessness into experimentation from their garage. Every year they made a 300-litre barrel of their own wine, researching, testing, adjusting, playing with different grape varieties.

In 2006, they decided to stop selling their grapes for bag-in-box supermarket wine. Both Toni and Ramon and Mercé (Ramon’s wife) have vineyards in different locations from their own families. In recent years, the wines of all three have been given their own labels to emphasise their origins more. Mercé’s wines under the “Mas Candí” label, Ramón Jané under his own name, and Toni and his wife Anna under “La Salada”, now from their own cellar.

In the years that followed, Toni made more and more different wines under his own label ‘La Salada’ from the grapes from his family’s vineyards in the hills of Alt Penedès, about 40 km from Barcelona. The vineyards were planted 80 years ago by Toni’s grandfather.

Toni and his wife Anna want as much live as possible in and on the soils of their vineyards. Bioynamic farming and low intervention methods are used, causing the vineyards to look a bit wild and overrun, but it results in producing fantastic and healthy grapes.

There are only native grape varieties in the vineyards such as cannonau, mando, monica, pearlada, roigenc, sumoll, torbat and xarel-lo. No sulfites are used, and all wines ferment with the skins.

Each wine of La Salada promises a trip to the Catalan countryside, a sip of family tradition in a cheerful bottle.