A $41 glass of 150-year-old wine is the wild future of vineyards

The rediscovered varieties better endure drought conditions, a highly sought-after characteristic in a modern grape

Miguel Torres Maczassek is the fifth-generation manager of his family-owned vineyard, Bodegas Torres in Catalonia’s Vilafranca del Penedès, about an hour outside Barcelona. Yet in 2012, he bought 195 hectares of land 1,200 meters high in the Pyrenees, even though it’s not possible to grow wine there ... yet. Torres expects climate change to make it viable to produce grapes in a decade or two.

“We are not about to grow pinot noir in the Pyrenees, but maybe we can plant the pinot noir,” he said, standing on his Catalan vineyard. “When we tell people we’re buying land where nothing grows