The beginnings of MacRobert & Canals

My earliest childhood memories are of running barefoot in a village in the Swartland region of South Africa – about fifty kilometres north of Cape Town.

Because, if you look closely, it all goes back many years, almost as far as my years.  My earliest childhood memories are of running barefoot in a village in the Swartland region of South Africa – about fifty kilometres north of Cape Town where I was born – amongst the farmland vineyards that my parents used to and still own. I remember the contact of my bare feet with the earth and I think that is where my love for it and my passion to understand it began. It was there that I learned to cultivate the vineyards and make my first wines, while studying Viticulture and Enology at the University of Stellenbosch. After graduating, I spent several years travelling between Spain and South Africa, working in the Priorat and Swartland wine regions, areas of small plots of old bush-trained /goblet-trained vines and without irrigation. These are fixations that I keep in order to obtain wines of the quality and personality that I dream of.

Even then, and completely unaware of what time had in store for me, I had fallen in love with wines, the fine wines of La Rioja, very special wines with a terroir that I could not locate at the time.

Maybe one thing led to another, the fact is that I also fell in love with a girl, also an oenologist and a traveller, whose parents lived in La Rioja where, so as not to tire you out with the story, we decided to settle down in the year… Clara, my wife, found a job with a well-known wine group – “if we are going to work in the world of wine, one of us must have a salary”-, because it was difficult for me to find a job; and it was precisely from this difficulty that MACROBERT & CANALS was born, as an adventure, from which we expected good fortune, the dream not only of finding a way of life in my case, but of building something that would bring value to society that we could be proud of.