The Inn, the Abandoned Vines & the Art of Staying Small
In Mirambel — a medieval village in the empty mountains of the Maestrazgo, on the border where Aragón meets Castellón and Valencia — Jordi Solà Contel, a Barcelona-born oenologist who trained in Priorat, Ribera del Duero, Toro and Sicily, lives in a former Guardia Civil barracks and rescues the vineyards nobody else wanted. Ten tiny plots, planted between the 1930s and 1950s, at nearly 900 metres. No additives of any kind. A maximum of 4,800 bottles a year. No plans to grow. Ever.
Origin — Not Nostalgia: Slowing Down, Finding Meaning
Jordi Solà Contel was born in Barcelona, into a family shaped by the rural exodus of the 1950s — the great emptying of the Spanish countryside that sent his grandparents' generation to the city. He studied oenology and did what oenologists do: Priorat, Ribera del Duero, Toro, Castilla, and a spell in Sicily — Spain's and Italy's most ambitious wine regions, learned from the inside. And then, in 2015, he turned his back on all of it and moved to Mirambel, a village of medieval walls and silence in the Maestrazgo of Teruel. As he tells it, it was no por nostalgia — not nostalgia — "sino por la necesidad de bajar el ritmo, reencontrar el sentido de las cosas y construir una forma de vida más coherente": the need to slow down, to find the meaning of things again, and to build a more coherent way of life.
The house he chose is the project's founding myth. Casa Masas was once the Guardia Civil barracks, and before that a village inn — a posada where travellers crossing this isolated mountain country could sleep, eat, drink, buy essentials, and stable their animals in the great courtyard. When Jordi arrived with his brother, they opened a small wine bar and deli in the old house, serving local wines, regional products, toasted bread and simple dishes. The bar is gone now; the spirit of the inn remains — today Jordi welcomes visitors for tastings with meals, by reservation, in a space that still feels like a refuge for people crossing a lonely landscape.
What pulled him away from the bar was the vineyard. Around Mirambel, old people owned small plots their families had farmed for generations — vines planted shortly after phylloxera, many in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s — and no one left to work them. One by one, they entrusted them to Jordi. He recovered, in the end, around three hectares of scattered old vineyards across the hills. In 2019 he officially registered his winery — forty square metres, tucked into the old barracks — and began selling his wines commercially. Production runs from 2,500 to 4,800 bottles depending on the vintage, and recent droughts have bitten hard enough that in some years he buys a small quantity of grapes from Bajo Aragón or Matarraña simply to complete the cellar. It is, by design, the smallest possible commercial winery. Jordi plans to keep it that way.
The Place — Ten Plots in the Empty Mountains
The vineyards of Casa Masas lie scattered across the Maestrazgo — the high, depopulating frontier where Aragón, Castellón and Valencia meet — in and around the municipality of Mirambel, at altitudes between 750 and 1,000 metres. It is a landscape being abandoned in real time: farmland once devoted to crops and sheep now lies fallow or has been converted to easier cattle grazing, and the surviving vineyards endure largely because a few families never stopped making wine for their own table.
The Field Blends Nobody Planted on Purpose
The recovered plots are traditional mixed plantings — rows where Garnacha (the dominant grape around Portell) grows beside Bobal — once known here as Tinta Requena — Bonicaire, typical of northern Castellón, Royal (locally called Rojal or Rotllofa), Morenillo and other ancient varieties now difficult even to identify. For Jordi this chaos is not a problem to be solved but the essence of peasant viticulture, where resilience mattered more than uniformity — a field blend is an insurance policy written in grapes.
Organic, with Only Sulphur & Copper
The ten parcels — 2.5 hectares in total, vines from ten to over a hundred years old — are farmed organically, with only a little sulphur and copper, and Jordi is slowly rebuilding the soil life the abandonment erased: natural plant cover is being re-established between the rows to hold moisture, feed the vines and rebuild the living ground of these mountain vineyards. All grapes are harvested manually, in 12-kilo boxes, from vines planted by grandparents and farmed by hand again.
Vines Planted After Phylloxera
Many of these plots were planted in the 1930s and 1940s — the generation of vineyards that rose immediately after phylloxera destroyed Europe's vines. They are head-trained, dry-farmed, thick-trunked survivors rooted in the thin, stony soils of the Maestrat, and they give tiny quantities of intensely flavoured fruit. When Jordi bottles a wine named for a single vineyard — Juan, Roque — he is bottling not just a plot but a family's century of work on it.
A Landscape Worth an Accreditation
In 2024, Casa Masas was among the first businesses accredited under the European Charter for Sustainable Tourism of the Maestrazgo — recognition that the winery's work is also landscape conservation. Every rescued vineyard is a pocket of the old agricultural Maestrazgo kept standing; every bottle sold pays for its keeping. Jordi's project is, in the charter's language, sustainable tourism; in his own, it is simply refusing to let the mountain go silent.
Winemaking — Nothing Added, Winters Doing the Work
Jordi's natural wine philosophy is radical in substance and pragmatic in detail. His first experimental vintages used sulphites and egg-white fining — and then, he says, he decided to stop adding anything at all. No added yeasts. No additives. 100% fermented grapes, as the Raisin directory records the house rule. The only filtration is an extremely coarse pass, meant not to alter the wine but to make sure no insect or debris makes the journey into the bottle.
What replaces the additives is time and cold. Grapes arrive destemmed but not crushed, the skins kept as intact as possible, and macerations run long — twenty to forty days, depending on the wine and the vintage. Then comes the step that could only happen here: during the second winter, the wines are carried outside the cellar, into the open air of the Maestrazgo, so that the intense Aragonese cold naturally precipitates and stabilises them — tartrate stability achieved by January nights rather than refrigeration. Only afterwards do the wines return indoors, where they rest a minimum of sixteen months before bottling.
The whole cycle — two winters, long macerations, sixteen months' rest — produces a small range of joyful, living wines, bottled unfiltered and unresolved. Catalan-born, Teruel-rooted, working plots on three provincial borders, Jordi is an exception even within the Valencian natural wine directory that lists him — "borders are drawn by people, rarely by nature," as his profile there notes. The wines taste like that sentence: Garnacha of the high Maestrat, speaking in whichever accent the mountain chooses.
The Wines — Maps of the Mountain
The range is small, parcel-driven and entirely from Casa Masas' own recovered vineyards — no additives, long macerations, winter stabilisation, a minimum of sixteen months' rest. In drought years Jordi buys small quantities of grapes from neighbouring Bajo Aragón or Matarraña to complete production, and says so plainly. Production: 2,500–4,800 bottles depending on the vintage.
Casa Masas Juan
Natural red — Garnacha from the viña de Juan, MaestrazgoThe vineyard of Juan — one of the entrusted old plots, bottled as itself. Old-vine Garnacha from high-altitude Maestrat soils, destemmed but uncrushed, macerated up to forty days, stabilised through a winter outdoors and rested well over a year before bottling. Dark mountain fruit, herbs, a fine iron edge — the flagship argument for single-plot Garnacha in a region that usually blends it away. No additives, unfiltered.
Casa Masas Roque
Natural red — Garnacha from the viña de Roque, MaestrazgoThe vineyard of Roque — the second named plot, the mountain's other voice. Same discipline, different slope: Garnacha carrying the mark of its own exposure and soil, macerated long, cold-stabilised under the open sky, rested sixteen months or more. Tasting Juan and Roque side by side is the whole Casa Masas argument in two glasses: same grape, same village, same hands — two different mountains. No additives, unfiltered.
4 Moles
Natural red field blend — Garnacha, Bobal, Monastrell, Embolicaire, MaestrazgoThe field blend as philosophy — four local varieties from the mixed old plantings: Garnacha, Bobal (Tinta Requena), Monastrell and Embolicaire — the local name for Trepat — co-fermented the way the grandparents' rows grow. Resilience over uniformity, in a bottle: each variety covers another's weakness, and the blend tastes of the whole mountain rather than any single plot. No additives, unfiltered, long maceration, winter cold.
Con Tú
Natural red — Garnacha tinta, MaestrazgoThe pure Garnacha of the range — a red of Garnacha tinta alone, made in the house style with nothing added: intact skins, patience, outdoor winters, rest. If Juan and Roque are maps of specific slopes, Con Tú is the grape itself, unmediated — the warm, generous voice of high-altitude Garnacha in the Maestrat. No additives, unfiltered.
La Foia
Natural red — Bobal, MaestrazgoThe Bobal bottle — from the variety the elders here called Tinta Requena, vinified alone from the old mixed rows. Fresh, deep, with the variety's characteristic dark fruit and lively acidity lifted by mountain altitude — seen in natural wine cellars at around €18 and worth every cent. Proof that the "minor" grapes of the field blends were never minor; they were simply never given a stage. No additives, unfiltered.
Legacy — Keeping the Mountain From Going Silent
Casa Masas matters because it answers the great Spanish rural drama in the first person. The Maestrazgo is one of the most dramatically depopulated landscapes in Europe — villages of medieval stone emptying year by year, terraces reverting to scrub, vineyards surviving only where a stubborn family still made wine for itself. Into that story walked a Barcelona oenologist trained in Priorat and Sicily, and instead of extracting a brand from it, he did the opposite: he accepted the vineyards the old people could no longer keep, one entrusted plot at a time, and rebuilt a working landscape at the smallest possible scale.
The legacy is agricultural. Around 2.5–3 hectares of post-phylloxera vines — planted in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, many in mixed field blends of Garnacha, Bobal, Bonicaire, Royal and Morenillo — are now farmed organically, with sulphur and copper only, and with plant cover creeping back between the rows. Every one of those varieties is a survivor of peasant viticulture's insurance-planting logic; every plot Jordi keeps is a pocket of the old Maestrazgo that would otherwise have gone to brush. The 2024 accreditation under the European Charter for Sustainable Tourism merely formalised what the work already was.
The legacy is methodological too: a demonstration that a commercial winery can operate with zero additives — no yeasts, no sulphur, no fining, only a coarse sieve against insects — and let climate do the fining and stabilising: wines carried outdoors into the winter cold for a second season, then rested sixteen months or more before bottling. It is the slowest winemaking in Aragón, and it happens in forty square metres of a former Guardia Civil barracks.
And the legacy is philosophical. Asked about the future, Jordi speaks neither of growth nor of expansion — his only ambition is to conserve these old vines, to keep working at his own rhythm, and to help keep alive an agricultural landscape that is disappearing slowly. In a wine world of scaling, exits and brand sales, Casa Masas proposes the radical alternative of staying: one inn, one room, ten old vineyards, 4,800 bottles, and a table where strangers are fed. The posada always was the point.