His father used to say of him, the sixth of eleven siblings, that he was an “enreda”. Over the years, Julián Cuéllar Reynolds reflected on himself and understood it. “To be an enreda is to be insatiably curious and this has led me, unwittingly, to become a businessman when my vocation was actually photography,” explains this Badajoz now-turned-viticulturist before uncorking a bottle of ‘Gloria Reynolds’, a red from their 2011 harvest that has won the first prize from the prestigious magazine ‘Grandes Escolhas’. He serves it on a slate table designed by him for tastings, which inevitably leads the conversation to his recent past at the head of the Villar del Rey slate industry that he directed for several decades and forced to close, forcing him to reinvent himself as a businessman.
A tireless traveller, with the demeanor of a ‘gentleman’, a lover of social gatherings, life in the countryside and settled in La Raya next to the Sierra de San Mamede, Julián Cuéllar confesses that he gives himself to everything with passion and if he doesn’t know something he Surround yourself with those who know. However, before coming to the wine, he begins at the beginning so that his life journey can be better understood, which has led him to cultivate organic vineyards on a 400-hectare estate whose farmhouses he has rebuilt little by little to settle next to the Portuguese population of Arronches, just half an hour from Badajoz, his city of reference right now along with Lisbon.
The tasting room adjoining the rows of barrels and exclusive ‘Seguin Moreau’ French oak casks was a former ox stable. Where there used to be mangers, there is now a Norton Commando 750 motorcycle, the first of this model to arrive in Spain and which reveals that he was always attracted to venturing into the unexplored. On the opposite wall, his ancestors.
«Thomas J. Reynolds (1786-1867) came from the United Kingdom to Porto, where he began to produce still wines and his eldest son Robert H. Reynolds (1820-1873) settled in Albuquerque to set up the first cork industry.. .». The photo gallery continues until it reaches his mother, Gloria Reynolds. «Of my brothers I have been the most traveled and without knowing it I have led a life most similar to my ancestors, who in their time already moved employees between England, Spain and Portugal long before the European Union existed. My great-great-grandparents were Britons who became Extremaduran and Alentejon when they married a Spanish woman and a Portuguese woman, nothing common in that colonialist era,” says Julián Cuéllar, to whom the photographer’s camera gives him the opportunity to talk about his true passion, what which explains his friendship with people like Lee Marvin or Sean Connery.
Westerns in Almería
Matilde, her mother’s sister, was married to José Gutiérrez Maesso (Azuaga, 1920-Madrid, 2016), a pioneer screenwriter, producer and film director in European westerns in Almería. Julián admired him and this led him to study cinema at the University of Leeds, in England, which allowed him to learn another language, an advantage for a Spaniard from the seventies.
«I lived in England and I wanted to make American cinema. When I graduated I went with my uncle to Almería. There I met actors or producers like Samuel Bronston and ended up as an assistant director for Columbia Pictures. Then in Madrid I created a production company for documentaries. My father was horrified. My brothers had normal professions and he wanted me to be a lawyer. In the end I studied Commerce, which I did not know would help me to be an entrepreneur, but my true school was the Americans. From them I learned the effectiveness, that ‘crazy thinking’ (crazy thinking) necessary to have results », he says.
First business steps
«My first company was import and export, I set it up in 1979 and with it I paid for my career in England, where I went from living on 5 pounds a week to earning 1,000 pounds in one operation. He was bringing slate from Galicia and this allowed me to get to know that market». The next thing was to learn about geology and mining before acquiring the Villar del Rey quarry in 1983, which had started operating 300 years before and was stopped. He enlarged it, modernized it and when it was two kilometers long by 600 meters wide and a hundred meters deep there was a collapse after some rains. “That was in 2006, there were about 200 employees and it was a profitable company that suddenly couldn’t produce,” he recalls. That event, the financial crisis and Chinese competition meant that everything ended in bankruptcy.
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His award-winning wine, ‘Gloria Reynolds’, is a red from the 2011 harvest. /
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Before detailing these events, Julián has already released a phrase that is the leitmotif of his life. «I cannot live without a project in my head, that is the obsession of an entanglement, as my father told me». And he decided to honor his ancestors. Six generations later, he began to make wine on the cattle farm that he acquired in 1996 with his retirement in mind. In 2002, forty hectares were dedicated to vineyards and he began to cultivate organically under the premise of putting nature to work for him and his son Carlos, administrator of the ‘Reynolds Wine Growers’ winery. The vines are spread over the hill of Figueira de Cima, which gives it an ideal orientation and altitude that he and his team of 12 people improve with sheep that keep the grass at bay and fertilize the land. Legumes and tubers whose roots work in favor of the vines by drilling into the subsoil and three meticulous prunings end up producing over 210,000 bottles a year. “We could make up to 500,000, but I was more interested in being a small winery with little production and high quality.”
His wine ‘Gloria Reynolds’ (53 euros a bottle) in tribute to his mother is only produced when there is an excellent vintage and last year one from 2011 was awarded 19.5 out of 20 in the list of 30 best wines by the magazine Grandes Escolhas, which has distinguished its winery as the most unique of 2021, a recognition that it claims to be enjoying and that it has celebrated as Extremaduran and Rayano in equal measure.
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