“When we told our father and our uncle that we wanted to launch a bottle with 77 different Catalan insults, they said ‘O.K., but please don’t put our brand on the bottle,’” Albert recalled.

Today, El Xitxarel-lo, marketed through a homespun and irreverent social media campaign, amounts to the blockbuster that has saved the family business. Starting with 3,000 bottles in the fall of 2013, it now sells 85,000 bottles a year.

The brothers recently opened La Festival, a retailer of organic wines set up in a Barcelona neighborhood full of hardware stores turned into gastro pubs. One wall is devoted to taps that draw from tanks full of wine. One tap offers wine from Finca Parera, the work of Rubén Parera, a 37-year-old vintner who persuaded his own reluctant father to chop down cherry, plum and peach trees at his struggling orchard to make room for grapes.

Customers at La Festival bring in refillable growlers and leave with wine to carry home. Which means the Virgili Brothers have engineered success by reinventing the very commodity their family began with: bulk wine.

On a recent evening, they were readying for a trip to New York to seek new customers, potentially adding their wine, bearing Catalan insults, to the wave of cars, auto parts, olive oil and other Spanish wares headed to points far away, lifting the country out of the doldrums.