Mendall

Laureano Serres makes wines as natural as they come. After a career in IT, he moved back to his native Catalunya to work at the local wine cooperative, until his dreams of producing natural wines became too radical for the cooperative and they showed him the door. Happily for us, this prompted Laureano to start his own winery, making wines his way. He started out in his own cellar in El Pinell de Brai in Tarragona, and now makes a large range of wines with nothing added at all from his 6ha of low yielding vines. He vinifies the grapes in a small cellar which is under his home in the village. In 2002 forgot to add any SO2 into one of his cuvées, and has been forgetting it in all of his wines ever since. Laureano is one of Spain's most vocal proponents of natural wines: i.e. wines produced from carefully, organically tended old vines, whose grapes are then picked by hand, and gently pressed to yield fresh juice, which is then fermented with native yeasts and without the addition of SO2 at any point of the winemaking process.