The story of the Alt Empordà is the story of so much of the Mediterranean – millenia of plantings and wine drinking and basement fermenting that ended up on the wrong side of stylish and vanished, almost literally in the space of a generation. Things are changing and it’s, sadly (?), no longer the height of fashion to carry a liter flask of rancio slung under your arm while you go about your business. You can see it on any road you take from Perpignan to Girona - whether the old smuggler’s paths or the ludicrous curves tracing the coast or the more efficient highway bored through the Pyrenees – abandoned terraces, ostentatious vacation homes, and towns that seem three quarters hollowed out already, populated only by ancient steadfasts. In this, the town of Rabós, some 35 minutes from the border with France is like dozens of others – but unlike all the rest, Rabós is also the home of Jordi Esteve, the winemaker / ethnographer / champion of the forgotten, who is quietly laying groundwork for an Empordàn renaissance.
Jordi, tall, soft-spoken, bespeckled and nearly always wearing a wool sweater, seems to be a strange choice for the great hope of Empordà – a territory of slate and salt air and grapes that would sizzle and pop were it not for the maddening gusts of the tramuntana. It’s not exactly like Mordor, mind you – and he certainly is not exactly like a hobbit – but together they’re the closest you’ll find of those archetypes in Catalonia. Jordi was born in Girona, but no one here holds that against him – his family is from Rabós, and besides, he’s the only one who came back. He spent much of his life cooking and translating and learning about foodways until he realized it all, the whole suite of Catalan food and lifestyle, came back to fermentation. What else was there but wine?
Stints in California and Chile served as technical training, but Jordi doesn’t think about them much. “I drank a lot of beer in California,” he says, ruefully. Nothing really clicked until he came back to Rabós in 2013 and consulted the experts – the elderly villagers who never left and who were starting to fear they’d be forgotten and who just wanted to see their work, their way of life continued. Through listening and a charm campaign for the ages, Jordi wove himself into the village– when we last visited he spoke of a social calendar of pig slaughter and holiday bread-making, of sardine curing and bartering for the best allioli we’ve ever tasted. Eventually, he was permitted to lease and eventually purchase 6 ha of ancient vines, many with their productive years firmly behind them, but still animated with an inordinate amount of poetry. In addition, he acquired a mentor in the figure of his neighbor, Jan, an ancient farmer who Jordi’s top wines are named in honor of. Though no longer, technically, working, Jan walks each day to the small shack in the eighty-year old vineyard he sold to Jordi to make pa amb tomaquet over an open fire, crack walnuts, and watch the grapes grow contentedly.
The wines Jordi makes from these ancient vines – which he terms Vides Velles, Old Lives – are true representatives of the region, with barely a smudge of paint to cover the rough parts. In all the cuvees, pressed in metal basket press (one cannot begrudge a winemaker a bizarre gadget or two) and almost all fermented in simple inox tanks, there is a nearly overwhelming feeling of depth, of layers. Some of them flirt with refreshment, but the sun and the wind and the soil all goad and prod towards the baritone and the baroque end of the spectrum. The whites, of which there are almost never any, taste like a chenin through a telescope backwards, while the reds taste bloody and alive and searing, with notes of the unfinished side of a piece of leather and crumbled roses. The rosatos from the estate are nearly perfect, provided you’re able to forget fifty years of Provençal propaganda whispering in your ear telling you salmon-colored and over-fined lies. They feel always in motion on the palate and howl for garlic and olive oil. None of the wines sees any manipulation or addition, relying instead on skin contact, long aging (Jordi believes all his wines need a year in bottle before they are ready to sell or drink), and the sheer health of the vines. “It’s like cooking,” Jordi says, “I just follow the grapes where they want to go.” There’s not a better place to put this editorial note, but Jordi makes some of the best sandwiches in Europe.

Perhaps the only concession these make to modernity is that the wines ferment to dryness, rather than the kaleidoscopic caramelized sweetness of the historical Empordà wines, made of boiled and sterilized muscat poured into tiny barrels to be colonized by the generational solera of the past. True to form, these archaic wines have dug their claws into Jordi’s imagination – several years ago he co-wrote a book cataloging old cellars in the region and has spearheaded the resurrection of nearly a dozen barrels, some filled with wine from before phylloxera. Tasting these is a monumental experience, a honeyed synthesis of past and present and a hint for the future of the tiny project, which has, we noticed, quietly started bottling a sweet wine or two. We cannot wait to see what is next for this project, this quixotic dream and earnest love letter to the rhythms of the past and the wines of the future.