Spain · Penedès

Celler Dumenge

Sunday-harvest pét-nat project from Penedès, making three wines from local Catalan grapes on calcareous-clay soils in the Anoia River Valley.

The producer

Celler Dumenge is a small pét-nat project in the Penedès appellation of Catalonia, started in 2019 by Laia Esmel, Jaume Vilaseca, and Oriol Roig: three people from the village of Sant Jaume Ses Oliveres in the Anoia River Valley. Laia and Oriol were already working professionally in wine. Oriol brought something rarer: five generations of vineyard management in the same valley. Jaume came from photography, with longstanding ties to the wine world. The winery sits beneath the residential floor of a building in the village, reconstructed as a micro-winery, and the range is three wines, all made without additions, all from named parcels.

The three bottles are Xarel-lo, Xarel-lo Vermell, and Sumoll: local Catalan varieties that most of the region had sidelined in favour of Cava volume. The Xarel-lo, sourced from the Viña Barceló parcel, is a dry, lightly sparkling pét-nat bottled at 10% alcohol, with lemon, pine, and wild herb on the nose and a gentle, lactic mousse in the mouth. The Xarel-lo Vermell is a white wine made from a rare pink-skinned mutation of the same grape, fermented and aged on lees before disgorgement. The Sumoll is an indigenous red from the Finca Cal-Mus vineyard, little known outside Catalonia. Nothing is added to any of them.

Known for

Pét-nat sparkling wines from Xarel-lo and Xarel-lo Vermell, and still Sumoll, all from named Anoia River Valley parcels without additions.

Notable facts

The story

The Sunday That Became a Winery

On a Sunday in September 2019, Laia Esmel called Jaume Vilaseca and Oriol Roig and said, in effect: let's go pick grapes. There was no business name, no winery, no plan beyond getting the fruit off the vine and fermenting it somewhere. The three of them spent the day in the vineyard, brought the grapes back, and started a fermentation in whatever they had available. Oriol knew how to manage vines; Laia and Jaume knew wine from the trade side. Together they made something drinkable. By the time they tried to describe what it was, they had a project. They called it Dumenge, which is Catalan for Sunday.

The Sunday That Became a Winery

On a Sunday in September 2019, Laia Esmel called Jaume Vilaseca and Oriol Roig and said, in effect: let's go pick grapes. There was no business name, no winery, no plan beyond getting the fruit off the vine and fermenting it somewhere. The three of them spent the day in the vineyard, brought the grapes back, and started a fermentation in whatever they had available. Oriol knew how to manage vines; Laia and Jaume knew wine from the trade side. Together they made something drinkable. By the time they tried to describe what it was, they had a project. They called it Dumenge, which is Catalan for Sunday.

From the atlas

Celler Dumenge

At A Glance

The Producer

Celler Dumenge is a pét-nat project in the Penedès appellation of Catalonia, built on three Catalan grapes that most producers in the region were moving away from. It was started in 2019 by Laia Esmel, Jaume Vilaseca, and Oriol Roig, three people from the village of Sant Jaume Ses Oliveres in the Anoia River Valley. Laia and Oriol were already working professionally in wine. Oriol brought something rarer: five generations of vineyard management in the same valley. Jaume came from photography, with longstanding ties to the wine world.

The winery sits beneath the residential floor of a building in the village, reconstructed as a micro-winery. The range is three wines, all made without additions, all from grapes grown in named parcels in the Anoia River Valley. When Jaume and Laia talk about what they are making, they consistently redirect from cellar technique to the origin of the grapes. That is an explicit choice, not a stance.

Place

Penedès is the large DO covering the inland plateau and coastal hills south and west of Barcelona. Its best-known product is Cava, the traditional-method sparkling wine that for decades drove the region's economy and shaped its planting decisions. Xarel-lo, the thick-skinned white grape native to this part of Catalonia, became the backbone of Cava blends, valued for its acidity, its oxidation resistance, and its ability to hold a mousse over years of ageing.

Celler Dumenge works inside the Anoia River Valley, the cooler inland corridor that runs through Penedès. The soils here are calcareous clay: limestone-heavy, free-draining, and warm enough in summer to ripen Sumoll, an indigenous red variety that rarely appears outside Catalonia. On those soils, Xarel-lo retains its natural acidity and produces a wine that, at 10% alcohol in the 2023 vintage, sits well below the weight of most Spanish whites. The pét-nat method captures the grape's fresh, lightly herbal character without filtering it through a second fermentation in a sealed tank or adding dosage at disgorgement.

Soil And Site

The Anoia River Valley's calcareous-clay soils set the physical conditions for the range. Calcareous ground holds moisture without waterlogging roots, and the limestone content keeps soil pH moderately alkaline, which tends to preserve acidity in the harvested grape. For Xarel-lo, which is already a high-acid variety, this combination means the finished wine retains freshness even when fermentation is allowed to run through naturally without correction. The Xarel-lo comes from the Viña Barceló parcel. The Sumoll is sourced from the Finca Cal-Mus vineyard. Detailed soil profiles and vine ages for individual parcels have not been published.

Story

On a Sunday in September 2019, Laia, Jaume, and Oriol harvested a vineyard and fermented the grapes. There was no business plan and no winery name. The three of them worked in a way that had more in common with a harvest weekend between friends than a commercial launch. What they made that day became the prototype for the Xarel-lo pét-nat and the practical beginning of Celler Dumenge.

Oriol's role in the project reaches back further than 2019. His family had been farming vines in the valley for five generations, long enough to have lived through the Cava boom and the replanting decisions it prompted. His knowledge of the parcels, the varieties that survived those decades, and the way the valley's soils behave across vintages is what connects the Dumenge wines to specific, named land rather than general Penedès appellate character.

The project was conceived from the start as something small and defined. The founders set a stated ceiling of 30,000 bottles across their two projects, Dumenge and Casajou, and production at the time of the first published reporting was approximately 12,000 bottles combined. The micro-winery beneath the residential space in Sant Jaume Ses Oliveres was not a temporary arrangement; it reflects the scale at which the founders chose to work.

Vineyards And Cellar

Dumenge sources its three grapes from named parcels rather than from the broader Penedès appellation pool. Xarel-lo comes from Viña Barceló, Sumoll from the Finca Cal-Mus vineyard. The Xarel-lo Vermell is sourced from a single parcel, fermented, bottled, aged on lees, and disgorged.

In the cellar, the founding principle is no additions. No sulphur additions, no commercial yeasts, no dosage. The pét-nat method means the wine is bottled before primary fermentation has finished, and the remaining sugar converts to alcohol and carbon dioxide inside the sealed bottle. A lightly sparkling wine emerges, with the faint cloudiness of unfiltered lees. Alcohol is kept deliberately low: the 2023 Xarel-lo is 10%. The Xarel-lo Vermell 2023 follows the same pét-nat path, with lees ageing and disgorgement before release. For Sumoll, the process remains less publicly documented, but the no-addition principle applies across the range.

Wines

The range is three bottles.

Xarel-lo: The primary wine, made from 100% Xarel-lo from the Viña Barceló parcel. Dry, sparkling, and light in alcohol. The 2023 vintage is bottled at 10%. The 2021 Xarel-lo Ancestral showed lemon, pine, and wild herb on the nose, with lactic roundness in the mouth, a soft mousse, and a clean, mineral finish. Those notes reflect the grape's natural aromatics on calcareous clay, without oak, dosage, or corrective additions.

Xarel-lo Vermell: A white wine made from the pink-skinned mutation of Xarel-lo, which is rare enough that it appears in almost no other producer's range outside Catalonia. The 2023 is a single-parcel wine, fermented and bottled as a pét-nat, aged on lees, and disgorged before release. It is vinified as a white wine despite its pink skin, which preserves the freshness and acidity of the variety without the tannin extraction that would come from skin contact. This is the most unusual bottle in the range.

Sumoll: An indigenous red grape from the Finca Cal-Mus vineyard, known primarily within Catalonia and rarely encountered in international markets. The packet does not provide a full retail listing or vintage-specific notes for this wine, beyond confirming its place in the range.

In The Glass

The Xarel-lo opens with lemon and pine and a trace of wild herbs, the aromatics of a grape grown on calcareous clay without corrective additions or aromatic yeast selections. In the mouth, the mousse is soft rather than aggressive, the kind of pét-nat effervescence that integrates with the body of the wine rather than cutting across it. Lactic roundness from the natural fermentation gives a gentle texture, and acidity holds the length clean. At 10% alcohol, there is no weight in the finish.

The Xarel-lo Vermell, vinified without skin contact despite the pink-skinned grape, carries the same acidity and freshness as the Xarel-lo, with the added character of lees ageing before disgorgement. The Sumoll, the only red wine in the range, comes from a grape that sits outside the Cava tradition and the international variety plantings that dominate much of Penedès. Its precise sensory profile from current vintages has not been formally documented, but Sumoll typically produces wines with bright red-fruit acidity and firm but light tannin.

A Bottle To Understand It

Start with the Xarel-lo. It is the founding wine of the project, the one born from that September 2019 harvest, and the most fully documented of the three. The 2023 is 100% Xarel-lo from the Viña Barceló parcel, bottled at 10% alcohol as a dry, naturally sparkling pét-nat. In the glass it gives lemon, pine, and wild herb, a gentle mousse, lactic softness in the mid-palate, and clean acidity on the finish. Nothing has been added to it. It shows exactly what the Anoia River Valley's calcareous-clay soils and a fifth-generation vineyard manager can produce from a grape that most of the region was treating as a Cava component.

Anecdote

On a Sunday in September 2019, Laia Esmel called Jaume Vilaseca and Oriol Roig and said, in effect: let's go pick grapes. There was no business name, no winery, no plan beyond getting the fruit off the vine and fermenting it somewhere. The three of them spent the day in the vineyard, brought the grapes back, and started a fermentation in whatever they had available. Oriol knew how to manage vines; Laia and Jaume knew wine from the trade side. Together they made something drinkable. By the time they tried to describe what it was, they had a project. They called it Dumenge, which is Catalan for Sunday.

Final Word

Celler Dumenge is a small producer making three wines from Catalan grapes in a valley where most producers have spent thirty years focused on Cava volume. The project is deliberately sized, explicitly local in its grape sourcing, and built on the argument that Xarel-lo and Sumoll are worth paying attention to in their own right, not as blend components. The Xarel-lo pét-nat is the plainest statement of that argument: a low-alcohol, addition-free, sparkling white from a named parcel in the Anoia River Valley.

Sources

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