The good season is here (hopefully to stay) and we are going to be hosting a series of wine-tasting events with domestic and international winemakers who will be telling their stories and pouring their wines.

We start this week with Ramon Perera from Celler Pardas, who will be at Sebastiano’s n=Natural Wines pouring five of his wines onThursday 21st from 5-7 pm.

Next are Jim and Jenny of Fossil & Fawn, an Oregon-based natural winery. They will be pouring their wines on Saturday 23rd, from 4 pm to 7 pm.

Tastings are free of charge.

Here’s some info on the winemakers and their stories:

Ramon Parera and Jordi Anan of Celler Pardas have become longtime fixtures of Catalonia’s low-intervention wine scene. In 1996, they discovered an abandoned estate 250m above sea level in the Penedés region of Catalonia. Affected by the Spanish Civil war, the Can Comas estate was made up of 60 hectares of unkempt Mediterranean forest and pasture surrounding a run-down medieval farmhouse. They discovered a gem – an ancient cellar that had survived the dregs of war. The two painstakingly restored the cellar and the building, carefully planting new vineyards and pioneering low-intervention winemaking in their region.

Ramon and Jordi have fought to bring back ancient varieties indigenous to the area like Sumoll, Xarel.lo and Malvasia Sitges. As anyone who’s tasted Celler Pardas wine knows, their efforts have definitely paid off.

Fossil & Fawn started out as a completely reasonable idea in the late summer of 2011. Jenny and Jim began with the notion of making a small amount of wine from their family vineyard as a single-site bottling, simply because no one else had done so before. The plan was to have a nice example to show to potential buyers of the Pinot noir and Pinot gris grown there. Somewhere along the line they figured that for all the effort, they might as well make it an official wine label. Thus, Fossil & Fawn was born proper as a wine label.

Jim and Jenny aren’t too interested in bold manifestos or style declarations – their goal is to make wines they like. They’ve found that the kind of wines they like are executed with a natural approach that allows the vineyard to do the talking. That means instead of buying yeast, they culture it from the vineyard itself, with no other additives or enzymes. It also means as-little-as-necessary sulfur additions and aging all of their wines in barrels, with very little new oak.