Partida Creus GT Garrut Ancestral NV

Partida Creus was founded in 2001 by Massimo Marchiori and Antonella Gerosa, an Italian couple originally from the Langhe region of Piedmont who came to Barcelona in the mid-1990s as architects. After several years in the city, they chose to leave professional practice and move to the countryside in search of a different pace. They settled in Bonastre, in the Massís de Bonastre within Baix Penedès, on land that would become one of the most closely watched natural wine estates in Spain.

The name Partida Creus comes from the old Catalan term for the crosses used to mark the boundaries between landholdings. It was an appropriate name: the estate itself exists at a boundary between the forgotten past and a new direction for Catalan wine. When Massimo and Antonella arrived, the surrounding countryside was full of neglected and near-abandoned vineyards planted with indigenous varieties that neighbors had deemed worthless — too old, too low-yielding, too unfashionable. Where others saw problems, they saw the raw material for the wines they wanted to make. They began tracking down the owners of these parcels, buying or leasing what they could, and farming everything organically. They were among the first producers in the area to work without any chemicals, which at the time was considered unusual even by local standards.

The winemaking approach at Partida Creus is uncompromising: indigenous yeasts, no additions of any kind, and no added sulfites at any stage — what they call "zero-zero." Their range is built around two-letter codes that identify the grape variety: GT for Garrut, XL for Xarel·lo, SM for Sumoll, BB for Bobal, and so on. The GT Garrut Ancestral is the sparkling version of their Garrut bottling, made using the ancestral method. They also produce a vermouth called MUZ, and over 100,000 bottles annually across the full range.

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Baix Penedès sits in the southernmost and warmest part of the Penedès wine region in Catalunya, in the Province of Tarragona between Barcelona and Tarragona city. While the broader Penedès DO is internationally known as the birthplace of Cava — Spain's bottle-fermented sparkling wine — Baix Penedès has historically specialized in full-bodied red wines from indigenous Mediterranean varieties. Its Mediterranean climate brings hot, dry summers, mild winters, and limited rainfall, with sea breezes from the nearby coast providing some relief and disease resistance in the vineyard.

Phylloxera devastated the region in the late 19th century and triggered a widespread shift from red varieties to the white grapes now central to Cava production: Xarel·lo, Macabeu, and Parellada. Many of the indigenous red varieties that had defined Baix Penedès winemaking for centuries — Garrut, Sumoll, Cartoixà Vermell, Trepat, Queixal de Llop, and others — were progressively abandoned in favor of these more commercially viable whites, and later in favor of internationally recognized varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

The village of Bonastre and its surrounding Massís de Bonastre, a limestone and clay upland massif within Baix Penedès, have become the unlikely center of a movement to reverse that abandonment. A cluster of small artisan producers based in and around Bonastre has spent the past two decades rescuing old-vine parcels of forgotten indigenous varieties, farming them organically or biodynamically, and making wines with no additions. The soils here — calcareous clay and limestone, poor and poorly irrigated — force low yields and concentrate what little fruit the vines produce. As of the 2025 harvest, the Penedès DO made history as the first wine appellation in Spain with 100% certified organic production across all its members, reflecting a shift that producers like Partida Creus helped initiate.