Penedès and the Torres family. Rescuing the past to make wine for the future.

A Mediterranean region with deep roots

Vines probably arrived on the Catalan coast with the Phoenicians or Greeks some three thousand years ago, long before the Romans spread them further. Yet until the 1960s Penedès was known mostly for Cava, its traditional method sparkling wine, rather than for still wines.

The key to Penedès is distance from the sea. Close to the coast it is warmer and the wines are broader; further inland and higher up they gain freshness and intensity. That range allows the region to make everything from simple everyday wines to some of the best wines in Spain.

Starting again after the war

The Torres winery in Vilafranca del Penedès was bombed in the last stage of the Spanish Civil War, in January 1939. The film tells how Don Miguel Torres, just released from a camp, rebuilt from scratch and then traveled to America to sell wine at a moment when French wine could no longer be imported. He was the first in the family to bottle the wines and send them around the world.

His son, Miguel A. Torres, studied in Dijon and came home with new ideas: plant vineyards and work with grapes such as Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon. His Cabernet vineyard, Mas La Plana, put Spain on the world stage when it was judged above Château Latour in a blind tasting organized by the French magazine GaultMillau in 1979. See how that success slowly won over a father who never wanted to retire.

The vine detectives

During a sabbatical in Montpellier, a professor told Miguel that old Catalan grape varieties never truly disappear. So the family began placing small ads in Catalan newspapers asking growers to report any vine they could not identify. The phone kept ringing. Over some 30 years the team has found around 56 unique ancestral varieties, often single old plants growing by a path or in a forest.

The episode shows the patient work that follows: cleaning the plants of viruses, growing them side by side in a collection vineyard and making micro-vinifications, sometimes fermenting in a single bottle. Recovering one variety takes at least 15 years. Six or seven show real promise, among them the red grapes Garró and Querol, now part of the Grans Muralles blend.

Planting for a warmer world

Miguel Torres was talking about climate change long before most of the wine world. Warmer seasons mean riper grapes, more sugar, more alcohol and less acidity, and the risk of flat, heavy wines. The Torres response is to adapt: buy land at higher altitude, manage canopies to slow ripening and plant varieties that cope with heat.

Several ancestral grapes turn out to ripen late, keeping their acidity into mid-October. In the episode we visit a vineyard at around 900 meters in the pre-Pyrenees, planted with the rediscovered variety Pirene, which the family compares to an elegant Pinot Noir. Find out why they call these grapes their passport for the future.

The next generation

Today Miguel's children, Mireia and Miguel, run the company. Mireia is described as the scientist of the family, her brother as the creative leader. They taste blind together every week and do not always agree, but they share a goal: fewer, more site-specific premium wines.

Watch how the younger Miguel pushed for a winery at a remote site once farmed by Benedictine monks, where Garnacha and Cariñena grow on poor, windswept soils, and why the family believes a winery should never be sold to a corporation.

There they ferment in egg-shaped vats modeled on how the monks once worked, and the constant wind keeps the grapes so healthy that little sorting is needed.

Go furtherWant to taste along? Find Familia Torres’s wines and where to buy them near you on Wine-Searcher.