FAMILIA TORRES: The Fascinating Story of Jaime Torres Vendrell

Uncertainties and economic crises. Transatlantic adventures, wars, and societal paradigm shifts. The devastating impact of climate change. These and many other vicissitudes have marked the history of the winery and the Torres family.

Although the winery wasn’t founded until 1870, the Torres family has been growing wine for over 300 years.

Each generation had to play the hand it was dealt by its era and circumstances. Yet no matter how difficult that hand was, the evolution of the Torres wineries is a story of constant, almost genetic, entrepreneurial spirit, tenacity, perseverance, and stoic resilience.  This has derived in a particular vinicultural philosophy that has earned international praise and accolades. 

Portrait of Jaime Torres Vendrell

JAIME TORRES VENDRELL (1843-1904)

At birth, Jaime Torres received an intangible heritage: the family’s innate entrepreneurial and creative spirit. With just a few reales to pay for his trip from Penedès to Barcelona, he decided to walk to the city and save the money for any potential contingencies. Young Jaime was astonished when he witnessed the frenetic life at the port of Barcelona, the constant loading and unloading of merchant ships with names that seemed plucked from the bow of pirate brigs. They all arrived from the Americas, their cargo bays full of rum, cedar wood, sugar, cocoa, coffee, and more.  

A workday at the port of Barcelona, near what was then Paseo de la Duana, where Jaime Torres had his living quarters.  

Jaime Torres was the embodiment of the nineteenth-century merchant. After embarking on an adventure that took him to Cuba, Jaime Torres returned to Catalonia to found Bodegas Torres in 1870 along with his brother Miguel. Initially the company exported Penedès wines to Cuba, but soon extended its operations to other countries. The seed had been planted.

But let’s return to young Jaime, seized by the promise of transatlantic adventure. He managed to get a job working in the kitchen on one of the colossal merchant vessels. Yet Jaime, a clever and persuasive young man, found a way around most of his duties and spent more hours reading Balzac and Dumas than tending to the stove. 

On arriving in Havana, Jaime – still an adolescent at this point – found work in a modest grocer’s shop. He prepared meals, dressed in the tattered hand-me-downs he received from his boss, and slept on a worn mattress under the cash register. Over the years, Jaime saved up 500 pesos with the goal and dream of returning to Penedès and exporting wine from his family’s vineyards to Cuba. 

Ever the curious mind and tireless reader, he scoured the newspapers and concluded that the emergent oil industry was a promising business that offered opportunities in the short term.

With the inexperience and ingenuousness characteristic of dreamers and visionaries, he wrote a large North American company and offered to invest his savings to join the business. The bigwigs must’ve seen something in that letter, because a little later, they asked Jaime if he would like to be their distributor in Havana. 

The dream of a triumphant return home was now a tangible possibility. And the rest is history.