The Viticultor, the Clay Tinajas & Wine as Art
In El Raposo, in the Tierra de Barros — literally the Land of Clays — south of Badajoz, viticultor Juan Leandro Romero makes Prelvm: four living natural wines fermented and aged in clay tinajas, from family vineyards over thirty years old and certified organic since 2002. It is a project born inside a family winery and pointed deliberately away from mass production — toward something closer to art.
Origin — A Signature Born Inside a Family Winery
Prelvm is the personal signature of Juan Leandro Romero, and he signs it the old way: Juan Leandro Romero, viticultor. Not winemaker, not proprietor — viticultor, vine-grower, the word that puts the vineyard first and the cellar second. The project was born inside Bodegas Romero, the family winery on the Avenida de Magaz in El Raposo, a small town in the Campiña Sur of Badajoz — and it was born as a deliberate turning away: a decision to step outside large-scale production and make wine closer to art, at a scale where every tinaja could be known by name.
The name itself is a piece of quiet erudition, spelled in the manner of classical Latin inscriptions, where the letter V does the work of U. Read that way, PRELVM evokes the ancient press — the prelum, the first machine humans ever built for wine — and the whole brand is a nod to the most primitive stage of winemaking: fruit, vessel, patience. Nothing about the project is retro for nostalgia's sake; it is primitive in the way good tools are primitive — because after thousands of years, they still work.
Romero's material is Extremaduran: old-vine Garnacha, Alicante Bouschet and Tempranillo — the dyeing grape among them, the same teinturier family that anchors the wines of La Tintorera and Escombro in this series — and his vessel is the one the region's very name remembers. The comarca around Almendralejo is the Tierra de Barros, the Land of Clays; Romero simply took the land at its word and put the wine back into clay. The range is small and stays small: four cuvées, each one a mood as much as a recipe — an honest red, an orange wine, a fluttering blend named for butterflies, and a sparkling white that sings.
The Place — El Raposo & the Land of Clays
El Raposo sits in the Campiña Sur of Badajoz, in the heart of the Tierra de Barros — the rolling, clay-soiled wine country southwest of Almendralejo that is Extremadura's most important vineyard region. The name says everything: barros are clays, the same red earth that for centuries has been shaped into the great amphorae of Spanish winemaking.
Organic Since 2002, Vines 30+ Years Old
The Prelvm vineyards have carried European organic certification since 2002 — more than two decades before organic became a marketing department — and the vines themselves are over thirty years old, gnarled, deep-rooted and dry-farmed in the Extremaduran heat. Old vines on clay means small yields and thick-skinned, concentrated fruit; the sort of raw material that asks for exactly the treatment it receives: patience in clay, nothing added, nothing taken away.
The Soul of the Tinaja
Extremadura's comarca is named for clay, and clay is Prelvm's winemaking home. The wines are fermented and aged in tinajas de barro — porous amphorae that breathe like wood without flavouring like it, letting the fruit speak in its own accent. Regional writers call the project "el alma de la tinaja" — the soul of the clay jar. In a wine country dominated by steel and oak, Romero chose the vessel that was under his feet.
Garnacha, Alicante Bouschet, Tempranillo
The red varieties are the historic triangle of southwestern Spain: Garnacha for perfume and generosity, Tempranillo for structure and savour, and Alicante Bouschet — the red-fleshed teinturier, Garnacha Tintorera under its French passport — for colour and iron depth. Together they make the blended Mariposeando and the backbone of the range, grown organically on the family's own land at El Raposo.
Vinos Vivos: Living Wines
The house calls its wines "vinos naturales diferentes. Vinos vivos" — different natural wines. Living wines. The phrase is a promise and a warning: bottled without makeup, they evolve in the glass and in the cellar, hazy at times, always in motion. Prelvm's wines are not products stabilised into uniformity; they are ferments captured mid-sentence. Drink them young and loud, or let them settle — both are correct.
Winemaking — Fruit, Vessel, Time
The Prelvm method can be written on a clay shard: organic grapes from thirty-year-old family vines; fermentation and ageing in tinajas de barro; no interventions beyond attention. The clay amphora is the project's entire oenological apparatus — porous enough to soften and oxygenate, neutral enough to leave the fruit's accent intact. Where steel preserves and oak perfumes, clay simply listens. It is the most ancient winemaking technology on the Iberian Peninsula, and Prelvm's bet is that it is also the most honest.
Romero frames the whole project as art rather than industry, and the cellar discipline matches the framing: small lots, hands-on, unhurried. The wines ferment with their own yeasts, rest in clay as long as they need, and are bottled as living things — vinos vivos — without the stabilising armour of additives. The result is a range that swings from the immediacy of a young red to the amber complexity of an orange wine to the pure celebration of an ancestral-method sparkling, all sharing one fingerprint: fruit that tastes of the Land of Clays, carried by the vessel the land is named for.
It is also, quietly, part of a regional moment. When Extremaduran press surveyed the natural wine surge in 2025, Prelvm stood among the handful of projects proving that the region's future need not copy Rioja's past — that organic vines certified since 2002, old varieties and clay vessels could carry Tierra de Barros wine somewhere new. Next door in Cañamero, the Felipe Cerro Audije family was making the same argument with pitarra; in El Raposo, Romero makes it with art.
The Wines — Four Moods of the Land of Clays
The range is deliberately compact — four cuvées, each fermented and aged in clay tinajas, from the estate's organically certified vineyards at El Raposo. They are vinos vivos: unfiltered, evolving, and bottled without stabilisation. Prices in Spain run from roughly €10 to €15.
Alma Pura
Natural red — organic estate vineyards, El RaposoThe pure soul of the project — an organic red from the family vineyards, fermented and raised in tinaja until the clay has said everything it has to say. Honest, fruit-forward and unarmoured: the bottle that introduces Prelvm's signature of fruit carried nakedly by clay, without oak's perfume or steel's chill. Around €13.50. For roast meats, Manchego, and the argument that Extremadura deserves a seat at Spain's natural wine table.
Raposa Naranja
Orange wine — organic, El Raposo, ExtremaduraThe fox of the town — Raposa means vixen, and this orange wine lives up to its name: amber, wild and quick. White grapes from the chemically untreated family vineyards are macerated on their skins in clay, drawing colour, tannin and the kind of savoury depth that turns an apéritif into a meal. The most playful bottle in the range and, at around €9.75, one of the best-value orange wines in Spain. For cured meats, hard cheese, and converts in the making.
Mariposeando
Vino de la Tierra de Extremadura — Garnacha, Alicante Bouschet, TempranilloThe butterfly — mariposeando means fluttering from flower to flower, and the blend flutters across the region's three red souls: Garnacha for perfume, Alicante Bouschet (Garnacha Tintorera) for the dye-stained depth of its red flesh, Tempranillo for structure. Raised in tinaja as a Vino de la Tierra de Extremadura, it is the range's most complete red — floral and dark at once, the teinturier's iron shadow under Garnacha's bright wings. For the Sunday table.
Cantos de Sirenas
Ancestral sparkling white — El Raposo, ExtremaduraThe sirens' song — a bottle-fermented white sparkling made the ancestral way, finished in the clay that gives the project its soul. Cloudy, alive, gently prickling with the same natural ferment that raised it: no dosage, no disgorgement theatre, no apology. The celebration cuvée of the Land of Clays — proof that a vino vivo can also pop. For openings, for endings, and for every argument settled over dinner.
Legacy — The Land of Clays, Speaking for Itself
Prelvm matters because it makes Extremadura's case in Extremadura's own accent. The Tierra de Barros is one of Spain's great vineyard regions — vast, old, and historically anonymous, its grapes long shipped north to fatten other regions' blends and its own name reserved for bulk. Romero's project is small, but its argument is large: organic vines certified since 2002, old varieties and clay vessels are not a handicap but an identity — one that regional press cited as proof that Extremadura had joined the natural wine movement on its own terms.
The legacy is material. By fermenting and ageing everything in tinajas, Prelvm has placed the clay amphora back at the centre of a region literally named for clay — reconnecting the Tierra de Barros with the vessel its soil was born to make. Clay breathes without speaking; it rounds a wine as oak does while contributing nothing but time. In reviving that relationship, Romero did not import a fashion from Georgia or the Jura. He dug it out of his own ground.
The legacy is also varietal. Mariposeando puts Alicante Bouschet — Garnacha Tintorera, the dyeing grape — back into a regional blend where it belongs, alongside Garnacha and Tempranillo. It is the same argument this series has traced across the series' subjects: the teinturier varieties that industrial Spain ignored carry more truth than the international grapes it chased. In El Raposo, the argument comes with butterflies.
And the legacy is philosophical: a viticultor's signature on a bottle; a name spelled like a Roman inscription; four living wines; the refusal of mass production in favour of something closer to art. Prelvm will never be big, and it does not want to be. Its ambition is the oldest one in the Land of Clays — fruit, vessel, time — executed with two decades of organic discipline and enough faith in clay to let it do the talking. Vinos vivos. Living wines, from living earth.