95 ENTREVISTA How do you bring together the wine-making tradition of your childhood with such an innovative personality? I have no idea where I got my personality from. As I say in my book, where I speak about the legacy from my father and the love of wine, “if you know how to listen, wine speaks to you”. I started out with a winery that only fulfilled the basic technical requirements to be able to be officially registered with the D.O. Ribera del Duero Regulatory Board and produce the first wines. Back then, I didn’t know that I understood wine in a different way, and I wanted to be a winemaker with my finger on society’s pulse, in every aspect. That gave me the chance to make myself known to the press. And from that perspective, those years were a combination of a great deal of effort, work and sacrifices. I mixed spending time in the fields with a tractor with hobnobbing, when I had the chance, with personalities from the worlds of sport, society and culture. Spending time with people and having a busy agenda has undoubtedly helped me to come to prominence. Not to mention, having an exceptional communications team that understand me and have known how to make it happen. The sales department is very important, but it’s the communications department that embraces all the commercial activity, generating the news the reaches readers and consumers. And communication is the key, even more so these days. Cepa 21 has successfully burst onto the market thanks to that commitment to innovation merged with the excellence and experience of tradition of a winemaker with roots like you. How have you brought innovation to a sector that is so entrenched in the past? I was always eager to apply innovation to every technical area of the winery. We never stop studying and learning, with processes that become protocols thanks to our knowledge, but, above all, through passion and a way of understanding wine. My dream has driven me to work from the viewpoint that you have to offer consumers a wine that you yourself have fallen in love with. And that has made me want to go a step further and apply state-of-the-art innovation through measures and parameters that helped me with decisionmaking, with artificial intelligence also applied to help us determine parts of the process. For our winery, innovation has led to a greater understanding of the wine-making work and has enabled us to obtain wines that are better suited to today’s consumers. We have moved on from strong-bodied wines with a kick to fine, subtle and elegant wines, and this has been achieved thanks to our innovation. I like to underline that wine is art, culture, that it conveys values and is the best catalyst of human relationships. It is the perfect companion.
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