-Diari de Tarragona: “We will create a great world wine with the sumoll”, Sílvia Fornós, September 2024-

“Of all our work, the most beautiful thing is to pay the right price for each kilo of grapes so that it is returned to the territory”, says Pepe Raventós in this page-and-a-half interview to remind us of the importance of the work of the local winegrowers we work with.

During their visit to the estate, the team of this historic headline was captivated by the nature that surrounds the place and the work we are doing on it, bringing the estate back to life, restoring the farmhouses and working to “make a great world wine with sumoll. The sumoll returns to Can Sumoi, a sign of where we come from and where we can go”.

The rains in the Montmell area (more than 600 L/m2 in the entire wine cycle) and the cool temperatures provided by the 600 meters of altitude at which the estate is located, led us to delay the harvest by up to 15 days compared to last year.

Surrounded by nature and with the Mediterranean as a backdrop, a team of 12 people harvested the 20 hectares of our old vines on September 19th and returned five days later to finish the harvest.

Meanwhile, the local winegrowers with whom we have been collaborating since 2017, such as Joan Espinosa (Pla de Manlleu), Anna Llenas (Querol) or Joan Batalla (Rodonyà) have once again been key to our project of minimal intervention wines thanks to their garnatxas, xarel·los and sumolls, which has been the queen variety of this vintage with very good balances of alcohol content and acidity.

This has been a harvest of slow ripening and low productions (4,500 kg/ha), in which we put the final touch with the entry of the last trailer to the winery on October 2nd, loaded with sumoll from Masllorenç; and with which we are already working on the vinifications to produce a wine that will help us to place the variety and this territory on the world wine map.

- Top 100 Wineries by Wine & Spirits, 2022 & 2023 -

We are proud to announce that Can Sumoi has once again been named as one of the top 100 wineries in the world, by the prestigious American magazine, Wine & Spirits.

This is the second consecutive year that we have been included in this exclusive list, in which very few wineries have the honour to appear, let alone repeat.

On this occasion, our wines La Rosa 2022 (96 points) and Xarel·lo 2022 (94 points) were the most valued by the wine tasting team of the publication, helping us to position on the global stage wines originating from the Penedès region and the varieties xarel·lo y sumoll.

A great achievement that we hope to repeat in future years!

In 2021, we discovered and fell in love with two plots of garnacha blanca in the Serra del Montmell: el Pla de Manlleu (600 metres above sea level) and Querol, to the north of Montmell (at 700 metres altitude).

The discovery of these old high-altitude vineyards led us to work together with local winegrowers to recover this native variety, which brings us this novelty: an elegant white wine, well-structured and with a good aromatic intensity.

So, in 2022, this Garnacha Blanca joined our family of natural wines with minimum intervention. And very soon, we will have the 2023 vintage!

The most alternative British magazine in the world of wine has dedicated an article to our estate and our wines. The co-founder and editor himself, Dan Keeling, was very impressed with everything about Can Sumoi. This is just a short extract of a four-page report published in this renowned magazine.

“Part of what makes Can Sumoi such an exciting prospect is not only the rebirth of a long-forgotten inheritance – a tendency in all Spanish wine – but also the ambition of elevating a grape not conventionally regarded as capable of greatness.”

The altitude of our estate means that the harvest is later than in the lower areas of the Penedés. This year, 2023, we started harvesting on 6 September, collecting our ten hectares of montonega and harvesting the last bunches of sumoll on 13 September.

It was a complicated harvest. The drought (it only rained 350 L/m2) and constant attacks from wild boar and roe deer, meant that our team had to work ceaselessly to obtain the maximum amount of fruit from our vines, and even so, production was about 40% less than in 2022.

The other side of the coin is the quality of the grape, with very good levels of acidity and excellent health, which is ideal for making our natural wines.

In April 2022, in our desire to recover local varieties on the estate, our team of winegrowers dedicated much of their efforts to replanting sumoll on the estate.

We have recovered nine small terraces (2 ha in total) with different aspects to locate these goblet-trained strains, which is the traditional method that allows us to protect the grape better from climate change.

It is exciting to feel that we have given the estate new life and that we are doing so with a native variety with which we dream of making great wines. Before then, we will have to wait, since this new planting will not begin to bear fruit until the 2026 harvest.

Wine&Spirits Magazine published a report in which it unveils to its readers the passion that led us to discover this estate and recover its vineyards. Enthralled by our old xarel·los and the views of the Mediterranean Sea, Patricio Tapia describes it like this:

“An equally singular landscape enchanted Pepe Raventós (…) the first time he saw it. (…) An abandoned vineyard, about 50 acres of old-vine parellada, xarel·lo and sumoll. (…) Raventós was fascinated by the place and found records of the estate dating back to the seventeenth century, when it was known as Can Sumoi.”