Brave new world

You can put Miguel Torres Maczassek through a perfume sniff test and chances are he’d score as well as he would identifying varietals from his family’s vineyards. After graduating with degrees in business management and oenology from Barcelona’s ESADE University and Tarragona’s Rovira i Virgili University respectively, the son of Spanish winemaking doyen, Miguel Agustín Torres, spent three years in New York working as a brand manager for Carolina Herrera’s fragrances, a label under Barcelona-based fashion group Puig.

“Perfumes and wines have a lot in common,” says the mild-mannered 36-year-old. “They are all about smells, which create feelings that define what a product means to you. But I prefer wines because you can drink them.” He eventually returned to help his family business with his father, a fourth generation vintner, at the Torres Group, the Penedès-based vino powerhouse that produces

the largest number of Denominación de Origen (DO) wines in Spain.

Excerpt from the August issue of epicure.