Spanish wine was not taken seriously as a competitor when Torres entered Mas La Plana in a Paris blind tasting. That was 1979, and the Penedès Cabernet Sauvignon won the competition, scoring what critics would later assess at 97 points. What Torres did with that credibility is less known — and considerably more interesting.
Rather than consolidating around Cabernet Sauvignon, Torres spent the following decades working backward into Catalonia. Grans Muralles, rated at 97 points by critics, blends indigenous Catalan varieties to revive a wine style that predates the international grape era. More unusual still, Torres researchers identified five ancestral varieties — drought-tolerant, heat-adapted, and commercially extinct — and began systematically rescuing them.
Forcada, the white grape among them, now covers nearly 50 acres at Torres's Penedès estate. Varieties selected over centuries of Mediterranean agriculture handle drought and heat stress better than grapes bred for Atlantic climates — and as Spanish summers warm, those old instincts are becoming practical rather than nostalgic.
Familia Torres
Torres runs 185 wines on Femente — reds, whites, and sparkling — across a range as wide as the family is old. Mas La Plana built the international reputation; Grans Muralles and the ancestral variety programme are where that reputation is now being spent. The bottles worth seeking are the ones that could not have existed without the Paris tasting: precise by design, entirely Catalan in origin, and funded by a Cabernet Sauvignon that won when nobody expected it to.