The Return, the Red Earth & the Field Blend That Refused to Die
In northeast Mallorca, on the rust-red iron clay the islanders call Call Vermell, Jaume Prats is bringing abandoned co-planted vineyards back to life — sixty-year-old gobelet vines of Manto Negro, Callet and Fogoneu tangled together with Premsal, Malvasía and Moscatel, exactly as Mallorcan farmers always planted them. Trained by Oriol Artigas in Alella, he ferments each plot's grapes together, raises them in steel and plastic — never oak — and bottles without fining, filtering or a single milligram of added sulphur. Five wines. Two hectares. One argument: that the island's oldest way of making wine is still its best.
Origin — Mallorcan by Blood, Alella by Formation, Home by Choice
Jaume Prats is Mallorquí — island-born, island-raised. But like a generation of Spanish winemakers before him, he left to learn his trade. He spent his formative years in Catalunya, cutting his teeth in the vineyards and cellar of Oriol Artigas in Alella, the reference point for natural, parcel-driven Catalan winemaking — working five harvests alongside a master of spontaneous fermentation and granite-grown Garnatxa. What he absorbed there became the spine of his own project: work with old vines, farm organically, ferment with what the site gives you, and intervene as little as possible.
Then he came home. Not to make wine in the fashionable idiom of the island's DO bodegas, but to do something more radical and more humble at once: recuperate old vineyard plots of indigenous vines in Mallorca's interior — plots that had been abandoned, plots planted the old way, in the traditional mixed-variety pattern of the island. The work centred on roughly two hectares of very old, nearly lost vineyard, farmed organically, on calcareous clay soils streaked with iron. Much of Mallorca's vineyard land was ripped out and replanted to international varieties in the 1990s; what Jaume went looking for was what survived that cull — and old vines of Manto Negro and its companions are treasures precisely because so few were left.
The first bottlings appeared around 2019 — tiny quantities, parcel by parcel, each wine named with affectionate diminutives of Mallorcan words: Jaumet, Met, Velito, Fonoll. Five wines, no oak, no sulphur, no certification sought and no appellation claimed — the wines are labelled simply Vino de España, though every vine grows within sight of the Binissalem DO. The statement is quiet but unmistakable: the place matters more than the seal.
He is part of a small but growing cohort on the island — Selva Vins, C'an Verdura, the 4 Kilos satellite projects — yet his project is the most archive-like of them all. Where others recover varieties, Jaume recovers plantings: the physical co-planted vineyard as Mallorca's grandparents actually grew it, red and white varieties sharing the same rows, harvested and fermented together. In a world of single-varietal monovarietals, his wines are the opposite proposition — not "what does Manto Negro taste like?" but "what does this vineyard taste like?"
The Place — Call Vermell, Co-Planted Vines & the Island's Interior
Jaume's parcels fan out across northeast Mallorca's interior — around Santa Margalida and Binissalem in the north, reaching south to Felanitx and Santa Eugènia. The soils are the story: Call Vermell, the rust-red, iron-rich calcareous clay that gives the Binissalem landscape its colour — free-draining, poor, warming quickly in the Mediterranean sun yet holding enough water to carry old vines through dry summers. And the vineyards are planted the old way: not in blocks of one variety, but co-planted, reds and whites sharing the same rows exactly as the island's farmers always did.
Call Vermell — The Red Clay
The name means "red lime" in Mallorcan — calcareous clay coloured by iron oxide, the signature soil of the Binissalem basin. It is the soil of the island's finest old vines: poor enough to stress the roots deep, calcareous enough to lend a stony, saline line to the wines, warm enough to ripen Manto Negro fully yet structured enough to keep freshness. Jaume's flagship vineyard sits on Call Vermell; his Callet parcel near Felanitx does too. In a region increasingly defined by its DO and its categories, he has staked his project on the soil beneath them.
The Co-Planted Vineyard — Six Grapes, One Row
The traditional Mallorcan vi de pagès vineyard is a polyculture: Manto Negro, Callet and Fogoneu for red, with Premsal, Malvasía and Moscatel scattered through the same rows. The old logic was practical — insurance against any single variety failing — but the result is a wine that could never be replicated by blending separate plots. Jaume's Jaumet comes from exactly such a vineyard: 50–60-year-old vines, 60% Manto Negro, 20% Callet and Fogoneu, 20% Premsal, Malvasía and Moscatel, harvested together, macerated together, fermented together. The blend is not a decision. It is a landscape.
Felanitx & Santa Eugènia — The Parcel Map
South and east of the base, two more plots anchor the range. Near Felanitx, at 100 metres on calcareous clay, 50-year-old organically farmed vines give the Met — 90% mixed reds with 10% white. A second Felanitx parcel, planted to Callet on Call Vermell at 190 metres, gives Velito. And near Santa Eugènia, at 207 metres on chalky clay, 20–25-year-old vines — including, in the oldest island tradition, some table grapes — give Fonoll. Three villages, three soils, three wines. The range is a walking map of the interior.
Abandoned, Then Chosen
These were not acquisitions. They were rescues — vineyards left untended, their old gobelet vines overgrown, surviving on stubbornness. Reviving an abandoned vineyard is slow, physical work: pruning neglected wood back to fruiting canes, rebuilding the dry-stone margins, coaxing the soil back to life without chemicals. Jaume farms organically throughout — no synthetic treatments, no irrigation dependence — accepting lower yields as the price of authenticity. Every bottle is, in a literal sense, the taste of a vineyard that nearly didn't make it.
Winemaking — Ferment Together What Grows Together
Jaume's cellar creed is the Alella inheritance distilled: direct expression of the places he works with. That means the most consequential winemaking decision happens before harvest — which vineyard, and honouring how it is planted. Since his vineyards are co-planted, the wines are field blends: every variety in the row goes into the same vat, fermented together on their indigenous yeasts. Red and white together, skins and stems together, in the ratios the old farmers chose decades ago.
The protocols are identical in outline across the range and personal in detail. Grapes are hand-harvested, then macerated whole-cluster or destemmed depending on the wine — five to ten days on skins for the reds and blends, eight for the flagship — in neutral vessels only: stainless steel tanks, polyethylene vats, plastic. There is no oak anywhere in the cellar. After a gentle pneumatic pressing, the wines finish fermentation and rest on their lees for six months, gaining texture without wood's flavour. Some cuvées then wait additional months in bottle before release — the Met spends eight — because a wine without sulphur needs time, not protection.
And the sulphur: none is added, ever. No fining, no filtering, no adjustments of any kind — the Jaumet, Jaumeta, Met, Velito and Fonoll are all bottled exactly as they finished, raw and stable through patience and cleanliness. The rosé Jaumeta sometimes carries a trace (<10 mg/L total SO₂), the ambient reality of a zero-addition cellar. These are wines of extreme delicacy — low in alcohol, alive, gently turbid — that ask to be drunk young and cool, the way island wine was drunk before categories and cellars and scores.
What emerges is a style recognisably Mediterranean and recognisably his: pale, aromatic, saline reds and rosés that behave like dark whites; field blends where the white grapes lift the reds with acidity and perfume, as they were always meant to. It is the vi de pagès — the farmer's wine — returned to Mallorca's tables, made by a man who went away to learn and came back to prove the old way was right all along.
The Wines — Five Bottles, Five Parcels, One Island
The range is deliberately tiny — five wines in most years, each from a single parcel, each a field blend dictated by how that parcel was planted. Total production is minuscule, counted in the low thousands of bottles, and every cuvée is bottled without fining, filtering or added sulphur. The names are affectionate Mallorcan diminutives — Jaume's way of keeping the register of the village, not the boardroom.
"Jaumet"
Field blend — Binissalem/Santa MargalidaThe emblem of the project: 60% Manto Negro, 20% Callet and Fogoneu, 20% Premsal, Malvasía and Moscatel from a single co-planted vineyard of 50–60-year-old vines on Call Vermell — a vineyard that had been abandoned, and that Jaume is bringing back to life. Hand-harvested, macerated eight days with skins and stems, gently pressed with a pneumatic press, finished in stainless steel and rested six months before bottling without fining, filtering or added sulphur. Pale in colour, aromatic and saline, the white varieties threading acidity and perfume through Manto Negro's red-fruit frame — sometimes described as a clarete-like orange-leaning field blend. The purest taste of the old island way of planting. 11% alcohol.
"Jaumeta"
Rosé field blend — Santa MargalidaThe rosé sister of Jaumet: the same family of varieties — Manto Negro, Callet, Fogoneu, Premsal, Malvasía and Moscatel — handled for lightness and immediate pleasure. Just 10% alcohol, under 10 mg/L total sulphur, under 2 g/L residual sugar: a pale, dry, featherweight island rosé that drinks like the sea air feels. Bottled without fining or filtering. The kind of wine that disappears at a long Mediterranean lunch — made, as everything here is made, the way the vineyard planted itself.
"Met"
Field blend — FelanitxFrom a single organically farmed plot near Felanitx, at 100 metres on calcareous clay: vines around 50 years old, planted 90% to mixed reds (Manto Negro, Fogoneu, Callet) with 10% whites (Premsal and Moscatel) woven through. Hand-harvested, fermented five days whole-cluster with stems and skins in a neutral polyethylene vat, pressed to stainless steel for six months on the lees, then bottled without fining, filtering or sulphur — and, unusually, aged a further eight months in bottle before release. A wine of patience as much as place: deeper than the Jaumet, herbal and red-fruited, with the stem-derived spice that whole-cluster fermentation gives. Proof that zero-sulphur wines reward waiting.
"Velito"
100% Callet — FelanitxThe rare monovarietal in a field-blend house: 100% Callet from a single organically farmed parcel near Felanitx, on iron-rich Call Vermell at 190 metres. The vines are younger — around ten years old — but the soil is old, and Callet is one of the island's most ancient varieties, the shy, perfumed, late-ripening red that old Mallorca prized above Manto Negro. Destemmed, five days on skins, six months in tank, bottled without filtering, fining or added sulphur. Light in colour, high in perfume: wild strawberry, dried herbs, a distinct mineral bite from the red clay. For those who believe the island's most characterful red is the one its own people always preferred.
"Fonoll"
Field blend — Santa EugèniaNamed for fonoll — fennel, the wild herb that scents Mallorca's spring roadsides: a 50% Manto Negro, 40% Premsal and 10% table grapes blend from a single organically farmed parcel near Santa Eugènia, at 207 metres on chalky clay. The inclusion of table grapes is the most old-fashioned detail in the range — a nod to the days when farm vineyards fed the family table as much as the cellar. Hand-harvested, whole-cluster maceration of five to ten days, gentle pneumatic pressing, fermentation and six months on lees in stainless steel, bottled without fining, filtering or added sulphur. Herbaceous, fresh, faintly wild — a wine that smells of its name.
Legacy — The Recuperator of the Vi de Pagès
Jaume Prats's importance is easy to miss because of its scale: two hectares, five wines, a few thousand bottles. But scale is the wrong lens. What he is preserving is a way of planting that nearly disappeared — the co-planted, mixed-variety, dry-farmed vi de pagès vineyard that was the default architecture of Mallorcan wine for centuries, until the 1990s taught the island to rip it out for Cabernet. Every bottle of Jaumet is an argument that the old farmers knew something the consultants didn't: that a vineyard planted with six varieties is a vineyard that tastes like a place instead of a recipe.
He is also a bridge. The natural-wine line that runs from Alella's Oriol Artigas — the most influential quiet teacher in Catalan wine — now extends across the sea to Mallorca, carried by a Mallorquí who went to learn and returned to apply. In the island's fast-growing natural scene, that lineage matters: Jaume's wines carry the Alella signature — no oak, no sulphur, site over variety — translated into the island's own grapes and its red Call Vermell. He proves the philosophy travels; what doesn't travel is the vineyard. That is precisely the point.
The wines themselves are disarmingly democratic. At 10–11% alcohol, pale and aromatic, unfined and unfiltered, they belong on lunch tables and beach terraces, not auction lists — the way island wine was consumed for generations before the categories arrived. Yet their making is uncompromising: single parcels, organic farming, whole-cluster ferments, lees ageing, bottle patience, zero additions. The tension between that rigour and that modesty is the project's character — serious wine that refuses to take itself seriously, named for fennel and nicknames, made from vineyards other people abandoned.
And the work continues. The two old hectares are only the beginning — more parcels of similar character are being brought into the fold, tended, restored, listened to. Each one becomes another wine, another village on the label, another small act of restoration. Mallorca's natural-wine movement has louder names and bigger projects; it may not have a purer one. In the recuperation of abandoned co-planted vines on red iron clay, Jaume Prats has found both his subject and his method — and the island, glass by glass, is tasting what it nearly lost.