Cabernet and Chardonnay from Penedès made Familia Torres famous, which is why its most interesting work is easy to overlook. For more than thirty years the family has hunted down grape varieties that vanished from Catalonia after phylloxera and the twentieth-century rush toward international vines. Miguel Torres, the fourth generation to run the house, treats the search not as a museum project but as insurance against a hotter future.
Their method is patient. Growers send in cuttings of unidentified vines from old plots, the team runs DNA tests, and the survivors are propagated and trialled for how they cope with heat and drought. More than sixty lost varieties have surfaced this way. Only a handful have earned a place in the vineyard, among them a red called Garró and a white called Forcada, both of which ripen late and hold their acidity as the temperature climbs.
Familia Torres
None of this means the house has turned its back on what pays the bills. Mas La Plana, its single-vineyard Cabernet from Penedès, still ranks among Spain's most awarded reds, and the international grapes remain the commercial spine. Those ancestral varieties are a hedge planted beside them, not a replacement, which is what makes the bet look serious rather than sentimental.
For a drinker, the tell will be on future labels. Names like Forcada and Garró mean almost nothing today, and that is the point: Torres is wagering that the grapes best suited to a warming Catalonia are the ones the region already grew and then forgot. Heritage, here, is a forecast.
Penedès
