We come from a family of wine growers for generations, it was not only the sustenance of my ancestors, but a way of thinking and living, if I stop to think about how they lived day to day at that time, sustainability and respect for the land was intrinsic, everyday life revolved around the land, including the important decisions of our family.
The waste was 0, the maximum use and recycling, everything revolved around the vineyard, for me this is where regenerative viticulture is based.
When we decided to move from conventional to organic farming and follow regenerative viticulture guidelines, it was the day we considered where the conventional system was taking us, we informed ourselves, we asked, it was a set of things that led us to make the decision, but mainly we saw that we squeezed the earth.
The principles of regenerative viticulture have the objective of recovering life in the soil, imitating nature; Because the more alive the soils are, the more capacity they have to capture atmospheric CO₂ and thus stop the progressive increase in temperatures, climate change and thus also contribute to delaying harvests that unfortunately are increasingly premature.
Elisenda Guillaumes director of agriculture of the Generalitat de Catalunya asserted that "the future will be regenerative or it will not be“
- Regenerative viticulture:
- Working the soil in a natural way, a clear example is not working excessively and thus contributing to balance and maintain the soil crust and avoid compaction.
- Being from June to March without doing tillage work is essential for us, since it is the way, forgive the redundancy, to regenerate the soil in a natural way.
- The purpose is to enrich its microbiota and stimulate it so that organic matter and microorganisms regenerate and fix carbon.
- In a way, it is still a set of tasks, a model that gathers the ancestral customs rooted in the territory for centuries, from previous generations, achieving a symbiosis of sustainability between the work of man and nature. A way of doing that helps to ensure that the organic matter is just and necessary, and to increase the natural defenses of the vine, strengthening its resistance to pests and diseases.
- Growing cereals is not the same as growing fruit trees, working and cultivating vines like we do...and it becomes even more remarkable if, like us, Celler Arrufí, we make wine.
- However, I want to underline and differentiate that the cultivation of cereals is not the same as the cultivation of fruit trees, as working and cultivating vineyards as we do, and, even more remarkable, if like us, Celler Arrufí, we produce wine.
- The vineyard does not need very rich soils, the vineyard asks for poor soils and, even if the production is "poor" and scarce enough to be able to achieve the holistic and organoleptic characteristics necessary to obtain good wines, with large productions this objective is not reached.
- And this is also the reason why the vegetation cover, which in territories and counties where the rainfall is higher, works very well, in Terra Alta it does not, it is a Territory with very special climatological and holistic characteristics, and to be able to work in vegetation cover would require an extra supply of irrigation water and, even so, it would obviously not be the same as in another type of climate.
