2022 Els Pájaros

Celler de Capçanes is a cooperative established in 1933, now boasting around 60 members and 180 hectares of vines under their control. Focused on the production of kosher wines in addition to the classic styles of Montsant, the house has an interesting history. Working from a Catholic town with no Jewish investors, Celler de Capçanes became a kosher hit in the mid-1990s, but the path there wasn’t easy. Finding themselves without any other collateral, the cooperative members mortgaged their vineyards in order to make the investments required for kosher production—essentially, they had to build a new winery inside the existing one. Within a year, they were producing the wine that would come to be hailed for many years as the best kosher wine in Spain: Peraj Ha’abib. News of their efforts reached the pages of the New York Times, and sales exploded in the United States. Today, Celler de Capçanes is a well-known success story among cooperative producers, managing to maintain their vineyards and reinvest in the area to turn themselves into a thriving outfit. To this day, it’s still a Catholic cooperative producing for a specialist market, a delicious oddity in the world of wine.