Partida Creus

Partida Creus
Antonella Gerona & Massimo Marchiori
Bonastre, Catalonia, Spain

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We met Antonella and Massimo at their bodega in Bonastre, an hour from Barcelona in the province of Tarragona, on the edge of the Massís de Bonastre. It was a pleasure to visit them and we were immediately captivated by Massimo’s never ending enthusiasm and Antonella’s warm welcome.

Massimo and Antonella moved from Piedmont to Catalonia around 2000, leaving their city lives behind. Previously trained as architects, they began growing fruit and vegetables, hungry for a quality of produce that, at the time, barely existed. Searching for wine of the same standard, and without pesticides or additives, they decided to make their own. 

Partida Creus is the old, local name of the plot where the bodega lies and refers to the stone crosses historically used by the Catalans to demarcate the land. Here, they designed and built their winery and began to make wine simply for their own pleasure, harvesting from a small vineyard came along with the plot. Gradually they began to work more with vines, intrigued by the local grape varieties. 

The first variety they discovered was Sumoll, a red grape disqualified by the DO (Denominación de Origen) for its subdued colour and often ripped out by winemakers to be replaced with more popular, profitable varieties. They made it their mission to find more indigenous varieties such as Trepat and Cartoixà (also known as Xarel·lo) and started to buy abandoned parcels. When Massimo was offered an abandoned plot of Bobal bush vines 400 km away from Bonastre in Narboneta, he couldn’t resist.

As well as rescuing abandoned plots, Massimo and Antonella graft old varieties to create new plantations of almost-forgotten grapes like Garrut and Vinyater. By recovering the past, they strive to build a sustainable, living future for the vines.

Steel tanks, damejeanne and oak, chestnut and acacia barrels are all used to produce wines with short macerations, founded on the 20 or so varieties that grow on calcareous and clayey soil. When a wine does not meet the quality they seek, it is returned to the fields as a natural fertiliser.

All the wines are “zero-zero”, made without any additives. VN white and red are their baseline cuvées, made with a short skin maceration and fermented in steel tanks, while their single variety bottlings are matured in small and large oak barrels. They also make a fascinating range of sparkling wines using ancestral method: from AA which uses different grape varieties every year, to a white ancestral XL from Xarel·lo, a red Garrut GT Ancestral and many more.