The Forest Farmer, the Underwater Cellar & the Ceramic Hand

Ton Rimbau is not a winemaker who read about natural wine in a magazine. He is a man who lived the toxicity of conventional agriculture and chose to walk away from it — a farmer who had an epiphany in his own vineyard, surrounded by chemicals, and emerged with a philosophy so radical it makes most "natural" winemakers look conventional. His story is told in the Auca de Porcellànic — a Catalan illustrated tale that recounts how, one day, while working his vineyard, Ton became disoriented from the toxic effects of insecticide and fungicide products. He asked himself: "Where am I?" And in that moment of chemical-induced confusion, he made a decision: "I will never use chemicals in my vines."

What followed was not a gradual shift but a total reinvention. Ton abandoned the industrial model of viticulture — the board-flat vineyards, the sulfur, the copper, the kilos upon kilos of chemicals — and embraced a system that goes beyond organic, beyond biodynamic, into the realm of permaculture. He understood that the vineyard is not a factory but a forest — an ecosystem that, if left to its own intelligence, will find its own balance. He stopped pruning his vines and let them grow like trees. He stopped tilling the soil and instead crushed the grass with a concrete roller, creating a protective blanket that retains moisture and hosts microorganisms. He stopped poisoning insects and started crushing them — flies and butterflies, diluted in water to 10,000 litres, then sprayed back onto the vines as homeopathic repellent. "That water has memory," he says. "Memory for those insects that do not come close to the strains and flee saying: we're out of here, that smells like death."

Ton is also a craftsman of wood — for over 25 years, he has made wooden boxes for some of Catalonia's most prestigious wineries: Gramona, Mas Foraster, Ester Nin, Josep M. Ferret. His boxes are designed to be saved, with a visagreta detail at the top so they never get lost. This craftsmanship extends to his own wines: the Porcellànic bottles are sealed with beeswax, capped with micronized closures (not cork), labelled with wooden veneer (so no chemical adhesive touches the bottle), and hung with an oak tag and seal. Every element is considered. Nothing is accidental. And the winemaking itself is entrusted to Manuel Ramón Avinyó of Can Avinyó — a winemaker with over 25 years of experience who understands that making wine without sulfites costs much, and that only patience and skill can achieve it.

The result of this radical philosophy is a portfolio of wines that are not merely natural but ancient — wines that Ton compares not to the wines of 60 or 100 years ago, but to those made by the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks. His Porcellànic wines are free — they go where they want — fermented with yeasts from the same vineyard, harvested by hand many weeks after the neighbours have finished, picked only when the grape bones are brown, and made with a concentration that comes from vines treated like a forest. They are wines in constant motion, wines that evolve, wines that breathe. And they are served in the world's most celebrated restaurants not because they are trendy, but because they are true.

The winemaking philosophy of Ton Rimbau is one of radical holism and absolute specificity — a system that combines permaculture, biodynamics, homeopathy, chromotherapy, lunar cycles, and underwater aging into a methodology that has no parallel in the wine world. Ton does not merely make wine; he accompanies it — creating the conditions for nature to express itself, then stepping back. As one curator observed, his wines are "living organisms, liquid landscapes and evolving artworks" — not products but open works that remain unfinished by intention, extending their life far beyond bottling.

In the vineyard, Ton's treatments read like an alchemist's manual. He sprays his vines with goat whey — unpasteurized, rich in amino acids, potassium salts, and phosphates — which acts as both a direct fungicide and a stimulant of plant resistance. He uses horsetail to combat powdery mildew and downy mildew, nettle to strengthen the microbial flora of the soil, and thyme and rosemary to disinfect. He sprays seawater — containing more than 86 elements of the periodic table and 50,000 trace elements — to provide health and vigour to the vines. And he practices homeopathy on a scale that defies belief: he takes flies and butterflies, crushes them, dilutes them in water to 10,000 litres (hitting the container 100 times before each replacement), and sprays the resulting water onto the vines. "If we sought a molecule of butterfly or fly, perhaps we would find nothing," he explains, "but that water has memory."

But Ton's most visually striking innovation is chromotherapy in the vineyard. Working with therapist Silvia Lledós, he applies colour therapy to his vines — using a pendulum to determine what colour is missing from a particular plant, animal, or person to achieve balance. He then balances the colours of the vineyards with large coloured spheres — "lollipops" of colour planted among the vines like sculptures. The effect, according to top sommeliers who have tested it, is a better balance and a more feminine expression in the treated wines. Ton has also experimented with the influence of colour on the taste of wine, serving the same wine in glasses covered with different coloured lights and observing differences in flavour. This is not pseudoscience for Ton; it is practical ecology — another tool in his arsenal of natural viticulture.

The harvest follows the lunar calendar with precision. Ton chooses the day of harvest according to the fruit-day lunario, with the waning moon, and at low tide. The hours devoted to harvest are limited and precise — corresponding to low tide. What they do not have time to pick up during the day takes place at night, with lanterns in front. The grapes are deposited in cubes without throwing, to avoid damaging them, and stored in a refrigerated truck to lower and stabilize the temperature between 5 and 7 degrees — preserving the aromas of the fruit until pressing. Once finished, the grapes are transported in labelled boxes to the winery, where Manuel Ramón Avinyó — winemaker at Can Avinyó with over 25 years of experience — presses them at low pressure in a vertical plate press (those of a lifetime, as Ton says) and ferments the must in stainless steel tanks at low temperature before aging in new French Allier oak barrels for 9 months, or in giant ceramic eggs for certain cuvées.

Ton Rimbau is not merely a winemaker; he is a visionary who has redefined what wine can be — a farmer who treats his vineyard as a forest, an alchemist who treats his insects as medicine, an artist who treats his bottles as sculptures, and a philosopher who treats his wines as living organisms. In an era when the natural wine movement is increasingly commercialised, Ton has demonstrated that the most profound wines sometimes come from a man who stores his bottles underwater at 2.5 metres depth, who sprays his vines with crushed butterflies diluted to 10,000 litres, who plants coloured lollipops among his vines for chromotherapy, and who harvests by the light of lanterns when the lunar calendar demands it. He has proven that Xarel·lo — often dismissed as the base of Cava — can produce whites of wild, pure, and professional complexity that rival the great whites of the world. That Macabeu — recovered from 10 years of abandonment — can produce sweet wines of such concentration that 9 kilograms of grapes yield only 1 litre of wine. That Merlot — a French interloper in Catalonia — can find a home in the Penedès limestone and produce reds of surprising finesse. And that a bottle made of ceramic, sealed with beeswax, labelled with wood, and stored underwater can be not a gimmick but a gesture of absolute integrity.

The legacy of Porcellànic is the legacy of the farmer who listened to the land and the artist who listened to the wine. Ton did not inherit a wine philosophy; he forged one from disorientation — from the moment when pesticides made him lose his way, and he chose to find it again through permaculture, homeopathy, and chromotherapy. His wooden boxes for Gramona and Ester Nin taught him craftsmanship; his collaboration with Manuel Ramón Avinyó taught him winemaking; and his own intuition taught him everything else. The ceramic bottle is not merely packaging but a philosophy made material — a protective shell, an aesthetic statement, and a commitment to authenticity. The underwater aging is not merely storage but a technique of silence — a way of allowing the wine to evolve in darkness, stability, and peace. And the chromotherapy is not merely eccentricity but a recognition that wine is sensitive to everything — light, colour, magnetism, and time.

The future of the project is tied to the future of natural wine as art — to the growing recognition that the greatest wines are not merely beverages but living materials shaped by time, light, temperature, and landscape memory. As the Spill continues to prove that Xarel·lo can be wild, pure, and profoundly mineral, as the La Llaona demonstrates that sur-lie aging can transform a Catalan grape into a creamy, rhythmic masterpiece, as the Cal Roget reminds the world that natural sweet wine can be as complex as Sauternes, and as the Espurnejant captures the spontaneous energy of young fermentation in a ceramic bottle, Ton Rimbau remains what he has always intended to be: a farmer who became an artist, who treats his vineyard like a forest, who stores his wines underwater, who sprays his vines with the memory of dead insects, who plants coloured spheres among his vines, who harvests by lantern light and the lunar calendar, who bottles his wines in ceramic sculptures sealed with beeswax, and who is proving that the best wines are not controlled but accompanied — one harvest, one lunar cycle, one honest bottle at a time.