Producers

Penedes, Catalunya, Spain

La Guixera represents the Spanish winemaking venture of Pol Andsnes, a wandering spirit in the world of wine. With a background of crafting wines in Croatia, France, Spain, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina. This project began to take shape in 2017, when he stumbled across unique old vineyards of autochton Penedes grape varieties - Sumoll, Xarel-lo and Xarel-lo Vermell, located on wonderful calcareous soils. According to Pol, his wines require quite some time to express themselves perfectly. He lets them age 3 years in barrels (made of local chestnut wood in the village nearby) and at least 2 years in bottles before release. The result is absolutely great, the wines are clean, stable, very complex yet drinkable and elegant, showing mineral expression and acidity incredible for this region, which makes it hard to guess the origin of the wine if tasting them blindly.

Such remarkable quality comes with sacrifices. Long aging of the wines in the cellar is an obvious one. Endless work with the vineyards is complicated by the fact that all the plots are small and situated in different locations. Pol owns one of the few plots he’s working with, the rest is partly taken care of by the trusted viticultors - with the constant assistant and monitoring, partly by Pol himself as the leaser. The region is going through unprecedented period of drought, which lowers the yields and puts the future of the vineyards in question. Not to mention too that all the labour is manual: spraying if necessary, harvest, pressing (!), bottling and labelling... Everything for the absolute astonishing result.