The Agricultural Engineer, the Daughter & the Hand-Painted Heart

Glòria Garriga is not a romantic who stumbled into wine through travel or tasting. She is an agricultural engineer — a woman trained in the science of the land, who spent years observing the industrial machinery of modern viticulture and found herself horrified by what she saw. The extreme techniques, the aggressive chemicals, the loss of sensitivity, the bulldozing of ancient cycles in favour of yield and efficiency — all of it repelled her. And so, in 2001, she made a decision that would alter the course of her life and the landscape of Catalan natural wine: she left the world of conventional agriculture behind and pursued an old dream — to live in the pristine nature of Font-Rubí, in the upper hills of the Penedès, and to create a viticultural project that would allow her family to find personal enrichment in tandem with the forces of Mother Nature.

Together with her husband Oriol Illa and their daughter Berta — described by those who meet her as shockingly bright and effervescent — Glòria began a search that led them to the very special plots of El Penedès Superior. They did not inherit a wine estate. They did not buy a grand château. They found old vines — some 80 to 100 years old — scattered across the hills of Font-Rubí, tended by growers who still remembered a time before industrial agriculture, and they built their project from the ground up. The name they chose — Els Jelipins — is, in Glòria's own words, "a name with feeling, without meaning, magical and strong." It has no dictionary definition. It is not a family name or a place name. It is a sound, a spell, a declaration that this project would not be bound by the conventions of the wine industry.

From the beginning, the philosophy of Els Jelipins was clear: respect for the land, non-aggressive methods, awareness of natural cycles. Glòria's training as an agricultural engineer gave her the knowledge to understand what the vines needed; her horror at industrial viticulture gave her the conviction to refuse what they did not. She and Oriol began working with selected hillside vineyards, watching over the growers' practices, advising them throughout the year, and carrying out delicate tasks such as pruning themselves. Each vineyard was chosen for its particular location, its climate, the grape variety, the age of the vines, and the soil type — and each was treated as an individual, their approach adjusting to its needs and potential. This was not farming by manual; it was farming by relationship.

What emerged from this slow, patient work was a family winery of extraordinary intimacy. Berta, who grew up among the vines and the cellar, is now an equal partner in the project — a mother-daughter team that represents one of the most compelling stories in Catalan natural wine. Their production remains minuscule — fewer than 4,000 bottles a year — and their methods remain stubbornly artisanal. They do not seek to scale. They do not seek certification. They do not seek approval from the institutions that Glòria once studied and later rejected. They seek only to make wines that are liked, that make people think, that banish inhibitions, that make themselves known. As Glòria once wrote: "Is that too much to ask from a fermented fruit juice?"

The winemaking philosophy of Els Jelipins is distilled into five words: "long, smooth, slow, and silent." It is not a technique; it is a tempo — a rhythm that Glòria, Oriol, and Berta have chosen for their wines, their lives, and their relationship with the land. In an industry obsessed with speed, control, and standardisation, Els Jelipins operates on a different clock. Fermentation takes around two months — not because they force it to last that long, but because they allow the temperature to establish itself naturally, and the wild yeasts to work at their own pace. There are no selected yeasts, no enzymes, no temperature control, no corrections. The wine is never racked off its lees, because — as Glòria believes — all that comes from the vineyard to the cellar is good and healthy.

The approach is deliberately, almost defiantly, gentle. If they have to destem, they do it by hand — berry by berry, cluster by cluster. They use small vats, individually assigned for each grower, so that the wine from each vineyard remains separate and distinct until the moment of blending. When tasting and respect for the wine's vital cycles tells them it is time to rack, they gently transfer the wine into a carefully chosen arsenal of neutral vessels: cherry-wood casks, large-volume Italian barrels, used French casks, terracotta amphorae lined with beeswax, and concrete vats. Each vessel adds something different — texture, breath, silence — but none of them add flavour. The oak is never new. The toast is never pronounced. The intention is never to dress the wine up, but to let it speak.

The aging process is where the philosophy of "long, smooth, slow, and silent" finds its fullest expression. The red wine — the flagship of the estate — spends at least 30 months in 10-hectolitre Garbelotto foudres of Slavonic oak and 500-litre French demi-muids. This is not aging for power or extraction; it is aging for integration — for the tannins to soften, for the fruit to deepen, for the mineral character to crystallise into something that Glòria describes as vertical, warm, juicy, and tremendously clean. The rosé ages in beeswax-lined terracotta amphorae — a vessel that breathes without oxidising, that keeps the wine cool and stable, and that imparts a subtle, earthy texture that stainless steel cannot replicate. The orange wine rests in stainless steel, preserving its freshness and allowing the 75 days of skin contact to express itself without interference.

And then there is the hand-painted heart — the symbol that appears on every bottle of Els Jelipins, painted by hand, one at a time, with all the imperfection and love that the gesture implies. It is not a logo designed by an agency. It is not a sticker applied by a machine. It is a love letter — from Glòria and Berta to the drinker, from the vineyard to the glass, from the family to the world. As Glòria writes: "All this love dedicated to each bottle is symbolized by a heart... If you try one of their wines, for a moment you will be part of a dream, exactly as Glòria and Berta have wished for." The heart is the final touch in a process that aims to produce what they call a Classic, Ancestral, Crystalline wine — a wine that is not dressed up, not green, not opulently fat, not oaked, not diluted. A wine that is, like the family that makes it, spartan-combative-amicable-ridiculous-happy.

Els Jelipins is not merely a winery; it is a manifesto written in contradiction and love — a project that has redefined what it means to make wine in one of Catalonia's most industrialised regions by refusing to industrialise, refusing to add sulfur, and refusing to abandon a grape that the world had decided was worthless. In an era when the wine industry is obsessed with scale, certification, and global distribution, Glòria Garriga and Berta Garriga have demonstrated that the most profound wines sometimes come from a mother and daughter farming selected plots in a village of fewer than a thousand inhabitants, painting hearts on fewer than 4,000 bottles a year. They have proven that Sumoll — once dismissed as wild, rustic, and unworthy of varietal status — can be a wine of crystalline balance, vertical structure, and mineral depth when farmed organically and made with patience. That a rosé of Sumoll and Macabeu, aged in beeswax-lined amphorae, can be both easy to drink and deeply serious. That an orange wine of Sumoll and Montonega, given 75 days of skin contact, can push the boundaries of what Penedès white wine can be. And that a hand-painted heart is not a marketing gimmick but a covenant — a promise that what is in the bottle was made with love, not machinery.

The legacy of Els Jelipins is the legacy of the engineer who chose the vine and the daughter who chose to stay. Glòria did not come to wine through inheritance or romance; she came through horror — the horror of seeing what industrial agriculture does to the land, and the determination to create something better. Berta did not inherit a wine estate; she inherited a philosophy — a way of working that is spartan and combative, amicable and ridiculous, happy and contradictory. Their cellar — modest, unglamorous, filled with old barrels, concrete vats, and terracotta amphorae — is a rejection of the wine-cathedral aesthetic in favour of something more honest: a place where wine is made slowly, silently, and with respect. The hand-painted heart on every bottle is not merely decoration; it is a symbol — of the love that goes into every decision, every harvest, every gentle rack, every moment of patience.

The future of the project is tied to the future of natural wine as an act of familial resistance — to the growing recognition that the greatest wines are not always made by those who scale, but by those who stay small: the mothers, the daughters, the agricultural engineers who looked at the machine and chose the hand. As the Red continues to prove that Sumoll can be crystalline and pure, as the Rosé demonstrates that natural pink wine can be both generous and honest, as the Orange pushes the boundaries of what Penedès skin-contact wine can be, and as Rusk captures the joyful energy of a young dog and a young project, Glòria and Berta remain what they have always intended to be: a mother and daughter from Font-Rubí who make wine the way their hearts tell them to — long, smooth, slow, and silent — always without sulfur, always with a hand-painted heart, always true — one harvest, one spontaneous fermentation, one honest bottle at a time.