Emilie Mutombo
Bonastre, Penedès

From her cellar in Bonastre, part of the low-lying Penedès region between Barcelona and Tarragona, Emilie Mutombo approaches her winemaking with a quiet integrity uncommon in a region dominated by négociant and cooperative-based growers.

Originally from Belgium, Emilie’s foray into wine began back in 2016. She first gained experience working an internship at a sizeable commercial winery in South Africa, then moving to the south of France to work at another which employed organic (but only just) techniques. However, it was attending wine fairs in France that proved most impactful—visiting the Loire in 2017 she went to Les Anonymes in Angers and met Massimo Marchiori of Partida Creus. Immediately taken by his amiable persona and forthright approach to winemaking, Emilie quickly negotiated a position at the winery, and began a two-year stint with Partida Creus that summer.

While at first Emilie’s intended role was an administrative one, she quickly made known her desire to take a hands-on approach. After a summer and harvest in the vines, Massimo granted her and a friend, Tom, access to grapes to make a cuvée of their own. True to style at Partida Creus, the formative wine took on the emblematic, acronymic name “ET:” Emilie, Tom.

By 2019, Emilie had honed her craft and decided to branch out on her own. She purchased a property in Bonastre with a small garage-space beneath from which she set up her cellar. To create cash-flow into the project, she took two months prior to harvest to work as a sommelier at the iconic Villa Más. Having access to a 2000+ bin cellar spanning the gamut of natural, organic, and conventional, Emilie’s inspirations and intentions for her winemaking became clear: to make wines of precision and stability without additions—direct, complete wines, that tasted whole, and had the ability to self-protect against faults.

Today, the project is spread across a small holding of Emilie’s and purchased fruit from a few trusted, local growers. In her own vines that surround her property, tilling is kept minimal and vineyard work is meticulously done by Emilie alone. The terroir of the region is dominated by clay and limestone, which both help to retain the extremely minimal rainfall and moisture, and encourage the roots to dig deeply into the bedrock for nutrients.

In the cellar, Emily follows an intuitive approach to vinification, meaning the approach to each cuvée changes year-on-year. Grapes are tasted throughout the growing season for ripeness and character, a practice that started in her days with Partida Creus, with decisions made from there. When the first picked fruit enters the cellar, the cuvées are generally started with a pied de cuve, made from foot-stomping the grapes for a short period, and the subsequently harvested fruit is added to the already-fermenting base in whole bunches, for a gentle, infusion-style maceration. There’s space for just 10 thousand litres, spread across fibreglass, stainless steel, and 5 barrels.

Mutombo’s ability to craft exceptional wines without additions cannot be quantified solely through the quality of fruit, or the cleanliness of the cellar, although both are tantamount to the project. Central to Mutombo’s work is a moral fibre that guides her, one that is paramount in making wines of great depth and intuition, craftsmanship and charm.