Albet i Noya

The Free Bacchus Story

In 1978 a Swiss importer asked Josep Maria Albet i Noya whether he could make wine without chemicals. Spain had no organic wine industry to speak of and no certification scheme to join. He said yes, and the estate has been the country's first certified organic winery ever since.

Almost fifty years later the DO Penedès became the first appellation in the world to require organic farming of every one of its members, and Albet i Noya is one of the reasons that was possible: a region cannot go organic all at once unless somebody has already proved it can be done there for decades without going out of business.

The estate runs to eighty hectares and is in its fifth generation. It is a certified B Corporation, which is a separate audit of how a company treats people and the place it operates in, and rarer in wine than the organic certificate is.

One thing we will not tell you is that the wines are biodynamic. They were once. A Demeter certificate existed and it lapsed in 2017. The farming may well be unchanged, but a lapsed certificate is not a certificate, so the page claims organic only — which, given it was the first in Spain, is not exactly a modest claim.