Producer in Focus

The Quest for Freedom

When I ask Glòria what drew her to the land of Font-Rubí in Penedès, she explained that she first visited at the age of two on family holidays and returned every year with her nature-loving parents as a respite from the hustle and bustle of nearby city life in Barcelona. “The houses here didn’t have any toilets or fridges, just a fire to cook with, and as a city girl, I had everything - I was fascinated”, she explained. So it was no surprise when she decided to completely change her life that she would choose to settle in the remote part of the Catalunyan countryside to pursue a life of moderation and enjoy the simpler things in life. Glòria is almost entirely self-sufficient; her vegetable garden is something that Monty Don would die for; solar panels run her cellar, and what she doesn’t grow from her vegetable garden, she forages from the surrounding forest on her daily walks with Ruski. “I find a lot of things in the forest - like asparagus, mushrooms and blackberries - I’m learning more and more to live like this, and my grandson, who is just two years old, knows what he can and can’t eat in the forest.”

Glòria explains that despite how rural her home is, that she is surrounded by a community of neighbours “we share tasks - helping each other every week with odds jobs in our homes - or there are workshops where we learn how to live sustainably, using less energy and less petrol. We depend so much on petrol. Everything that we use is related to it. It’s useful to learn how to change small things to reduce the number of resources possible. I then try to translate this to winemaking."

Something else which marks Glòria’s life apart from the rest of us is how she governs her time. She explains that she hasn’t woken up with an alarm clock for over 20 years now. “I used to do it, and I found it terrible. I wake up very early but not before my body needs it. I think this is what life should be.” However, when it is the harvest, the shape of her day is very different. Ten to twelve hours every day hand-selecting and destemming only the best grapes “and if it’s not 100% perfect, it won’t go into the barrels” over 5-6,000 kilos, for a petite lady, this is no mean feat.

Glòria explains how they didn't have a story in the wine world, the first four vintages were especially tough - "we had to invest a lot of money buying grapes; the wine was still ageing, so we had to wait a long time before we were able to sell, and it was a disaster because we didn't have any money to travel. The restaurants in Spain didn't like the wines; they found them to be too rustic. My partner was really frustrated, but fortunately, we found foreign sommeliers who understood the wine and agreed to buy it."

"I'm very stubborn and said I don't care. This is the style that I like, and so we kept going"

To add to this, the Jelipins were up against the powerful influence of the American wine critic Robert Parker. This period was commonly known as the Parkerisation of wine. "Even in Rioja, the effect was felt with some producers changing their style in favour of big powerful, dark, fruity, oaky, full-bodied wines in an attempt to please Parker and get his points, and the wine was sh*t! It was just scorched wood, coffee, toasted, horrible… but this style sold in the states, and there we were with our wine which was delicate, pale in colour and high in acidity, and people were saying, what is this? It was very frustrating, so we drove our wines to the top restaurants in the Basque country and would sleep in campsites with our cases of wines and in the morning we would visit the restaurants - "hello we are the Jelipins" - thankfully we found sommeliers who got it and the rest was word of mouth."

Despite Glòria's global success today, she still faces challenges - mainly due to the weather. The Sumoll grape is a thin-skinned, late-ripening varietal that can get severely damaged when the heavy rains arrive in October. In 2018 the rainfall was so intense that Glòria had to forgo making red wine and could only produce a rosé. 

This Lady Means Business

Glòria and I laugh about how she's known as the lady who lives up in the hills telling the old farmers what to do, challenging the status quo. She tells me how she doesn't own any vines but invests in long-standing relationships with local farmers. This way, she can offer them a very good price for the grapes, and it allows her to persuade them to work the land more sustainably and respectfully.

"You should see how to old farmers look at me. Now everybody knows me, but at the beginning, nobody wanted to trust a woman - can you imagine for the old farmers, a woman telling them what to do! - no way!"

“I tried to convince them to leave the cover crop, but they thought that it would compete with the water for the vines. But in 100-year-old vines that have roots that are 2,000 meters deep, a small bit of grass isn't competing at all, the more organic matter you leave in the field - the better, to help keep humidity and so that the earth can nourish itself - they burn the organic matter in this country. It's a job to convince them to do things differently. In the beginning, I had to show them how I wanted them to prune. They are used to pruning for high yields, but I don't want yield - I want quality. Initially, they were used to collecting everything in one day. I'd say… okay, first I'm going to pick the grapes for rosé, can you see that this grape is ripe and this one isn't? This is especially true in old Sumoll vines - each grape matures at different times, so we have to pick each grape individually. For one plant, we pass many times. When we harvest, a small team of friends and family help, and I explain how to look out for perfect ripeness across different days.”