Xarel-lo, Enric Soler 'Espenyalluchs'

With more than fifteen vintages under his belt, Enric Soler has definitively proven the grandiose potential of still Xarel.lo from Catalonia. Historically seen as the base wine for an ocean of Cava, Soler began in 2004 with a radically different approach, treating his native terroir and grapes as if they had the potential to make some of the world’s best white wines. It turns out that Soler was entirely correct, and today, his miniscule production of handcrafted wines are some of the most allocated bottles in Spain.

In the Espenyalluchs plot, a gently sloping land at 400 meters above sea level, a hectare of grapevines are planted with a judicious massale selection of the best vine shoots of the Vinya dels Taus. All the mystical wisdom of the symbolic old vineyard is transferred onto one slope, under a supervision which combines intuition and experience. From the first vintage in 2013, the majesty of the grape is revealed and offers a profile of Xarel-lo that is both meditative and electric. The wine ferments and ages in the winery’s oldest barrels. Espenyalluchs is a wine that retains the unmistakable reflective character of the white wines made at the winery and aims to convey the purity of this variety.