Winemaker's Q&A with Brennan Firth


Brennan Firth started making his own wine, Cepas Elegidas, at the age of 25. His premium wine was launched in 2012 into the Argentine and international market.

How did you fall in love with wine?

I fell in love with wine thanks to my dad! All my life he has owned and operated dozens of restaurants which allowed him to hand-select wines worldwide. Every night he’d have a couple glasses of red wine, never a white! He would let me and my brother smell the glass and ask us what we perceived…a big task for all of my 6 years of existence! When my mom would go into the kitchen, I’d sneak in a small sip that my dad would offer me and pass the glass back. I didn’t LOVE the taste, but it was interesting to try. The aromas on the other hand had me asking questions and offering thoughts non stop. After another 10 years of this my parents had enough and decided we could move on to the next step, traveling to Italy and visiting among the most well recognized wine regions and producers. After almost 3 months of my ‘Escursione di Italia’ we had visited dozens of winery’s, such as Gaja and Prunotto, a couple of Italy’s top producers.

Starting your own winery at age 25 is a pretty bold move, how much of winemaking do you think is intuition or calculated measures?

If you have intuition but don’t have some concrete knowledge and understanding of vineyards, the chemistry of wine and it’s natural organic makeup, you won’t get far in this business.
As you make your ‘calculated measures’ you also learn from your mistakes, and later calculate other measures for future decision making.

What do you need to make the perfect wine?

The perfect wine is simple… buy the best fruit, process the fruit and make the wine using only the best techniques and practices and store the wine in the best barrel, later bottle and you’re all done!