We are bombarding you ad nauseam about the celebration that we are carrying out this 2023, but 60 years of the creation of a winery cannot be overlooked.
For months we have been conducting tastings throughout the national geography with the Qualified Estate Wines, uncorking some mythical vintages and spectacular formats.
We have made a “restyling” of the labels of these wines, which represent the true essence of the wines created by Jean Leon, to bring us closer to their original labels.
We focus on the also fascinating history of the winery, the vineyards, the origin of the vines, the history of the wines… and its people, especially Jaume Rovira, first winemaker and Jean Leon’s right hand man, and always linked to the winery, who left us a year ago after a serious illness.
But 60 years, six decades, a diamond wedding anniversary with a unique terroir are not for less and especially this October, which was when Jean Leon gave the deposit of 300,000 pesetas for the acquisition of the vineyard, conditioned to a soil analysis so that Professor Amerine, from the University of Davis, would approve them for the planting of the French varieties that would turn his wines into pioneers.
To offer you the final toast, today we “paired” four Hollywood stars who knew Jean Leon very well, with some of the winery’s wines:
Marilyn Monroe
Sharing their life experience, their childhood memories, made them feel like siblings. This was the real relationship between Jean and Marilyn. Theirs was true friendship and complicity. Marilyn starred in the most sadly known anecdote of Jean Leon’s life, having served the film icon’s last supper, some fettuccine with a bottle of rosé wine.
Marilyn never got to know Jean Leon’s wines, but we are sure that, although she always talked about champagne, she would have loved our 3055 Rosé, our pale rosé of pinot noir and grenache, which was one of the pioneers of this style in our country.
Elisaberth Taylor
The look with the violet eyes was known for her excesses when it came to food and drink, and one of the best-known anecdotes about Jean Leon was that she had cannelloni brought from La Scala during the filming of Cleopatra in London.
We can say that she tasted at least two of Jean Leon’s wines when she attended the inauguration dinner of US President Ronald Reagan on January 20, 1981. And a lover as she was of white wines, she was surely enthusiastic about the Jean Leon Vinya Gigi Chardonnay, the elegant chardonnay pioneer in Spain of barrel-fermented wines of this variety.
James Dean
Of the man who was to become Jean Leon’s partner in the opening of La Scala restaurant in Beverly Hills, we do not know much about his wine tastes. They came into contact with Jean Leon at Frank Sinatra’s restaurant Villa Capri, where our Santander native started in the restaurant business and which allowed him to come into contact with all the glamour of Hollywood in the 50s.
But we are sure that James Dean would have appreciated the last wine that saw the birth of Jean Leon in the winery, when in 1991 Jaume Rovira convinced him to replace the Pinot Noir vines with Merlot. Jean Leon Vinya Palau Merlot is one of the best Merlots produced in our country. It preserves the typical varietal character of the Saint-Émilion area, especially in cool vintages.
Frank Sinatra
It was he who gave Jean Leon the opportunity to rub shoulders with Hollywood’s finest when he worked at his restaurant Villa Capri where he became Maître d’. But when Jean Leon opened La Scala and took his famed clientele with him, it didn’t sit particularly well with him. Eventually, Frank Sinatra himself became a client of Jean Leon’s restaurant, inaugurating the restaurant’s most famous table: the chef’s table, located inside the kitchen.
We know of this singer and actor’s fondness for bourbon and Italian wines, especially Tuscan. But it would not be surprising if he was one of the first to taste the cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc wine produced in the Penedès winery. That blending of the two cabernets is still alive today in the JEAN LEON VINYA LE HAVRE, and this year you can enjoy a special 60th Anniversary edition by getting one of the bottles of the 2013 vintage, a cold and very qualitative vintage of which 12,000 units were set aside to celebrate in style, with our customers and friends this historic date.
60 years. 6 decades. The diamond wedding anniversary with a terroir but also with a CLEAR commitment to maintain the legacy of the founder of the winery and offer you new products through the 3055 range, Nativa and the “Experimental Wines” to continue growing and to show you all that this vineyard, chosen by that dreamer and visionary Jean Leon, is capable of offering.
By Sergi Castro, Sommelier
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