Sara Pérez is describing the texture of her wine. “It’s not round, but it’s warm,” she says, and seems to put her whole body into capturing the wine’s essence, its opulence and precision. She looks like a flamenco bailaora, twisting and turning in the strong autumn sun outside her winery, Clos Martinet.
Pérez is the embodiment of the wave of excitement coursing through Priorat, and its sister appellation Montsant. In Priorat it’s a second revolution, exactly 25 years after Pérez’ father Josep Lluis Pérez, René Barbier of Clos Mogador, Alvaro Palacios and a motley crew of inspired dreamers released the first wine of a cooperative that went on to spawn some of the greatest names of Priorat.
The hippy-ish Barbier (he still drives around in a battered van with dusty velour seat covers) was one of the first to recognise the potential of the forbidding slate hillsides of Priorat. He and his colleagues – including Palacios at Finca Dofi, and Pérez at Mas Martinet – produced Garnacha- and Carignan-based wines of extraordinary intensity and concentration, high in alcohol, deep in colour and with robust tannins. They were big, but they were nothing like the wines Priorat had been producing before: tannic monsters often weighing in at 18% alcohol.
Priorat’s revolution
A generation ago Priorat looked very different. Wine has been made here since the Carthusian monks founded the monastery of Scala Dei in the 12th century, and by the second half of the 19th century there were 25,000 ha of vineyard. Then came phylloxera, the vineland was decimated (literally – there are 2,000 ha of vineyard today), and the region was depopulated as farmers migrated to Barcelona. There were better ways of making money than coaxing low-yielding vines from broiling, stony hillsides.
Now it is that very stone – Priorat’s llicorella (slate) – that captures the modern winemaker’s imagination. To borrow the words of another Spanish winemaker, Fernando González of Adega Algueira far to the west in Ribeira Sacra, “the vines drink stone”. At Vall Llach’s vineyards in Porrera to the east of the appellation, 45-year-old Carignan sends its roots twenty metres through shattered slate in a desperate search for moisture.
Priorat now has the (possibly dubious) honour of competing with Ribera del Duero to produce Spain’s most expensive wine. Corney & Barrow sells Palacios’ L’Ermita 2005 for a bit more than £430.00 ($650.00) a bottle; the region is awash with £100.00 cuvées.
One of the reasons for this success was Priorat’s luck in catching the eye of Robert Parker and his journal, Wine Advocate. The American critic enthusiastically favours Priorat with 98-point scores – for such as Clos Mogador and Les Manyes – and recently Wine Advocate’s Spanish correspondent Luis Gutiérrez gave a coveted 100 points to Arrels del Priorat Ca les Vinyes, a 100-year-old solera wine made by Barbier in quantities that are so tiny as to be ‘homeopathic’, in Gutiérrez’ evocative phrase.
Parker’s influence and the fame it brings can have its disadvantages, however. Priorat wines are of an astonishingly high standard, often beautifully made, the very best of them laden with earthy fruit, crisp minerality and warm, sweet perfumed tannins. But the region has become so expensive, the cost of its land so high, that in order to be profitable its wines must play well in dozens of different markets. They must be as agreeable to a tableful of businessmen in Seoul as to a dinner party in Oslo. René Barbier exports around the globe, from China to Cyprus, Denmark to Brazil.
With that kind of audience, there’s a temptation to give wines a polish so bright it eclipses their natural character.
Another bodega with a huge export market is Mas d’en Gil in Bellmunt in the south. A property with a 300-year history, in the hands of the Rovira family since 1998, along with Scala Dei it was one of the first Priorat wineries to start bottling wine in the 1970s. The 120-ha property is beautiful, its buildings ringed by quince and mulberry trees. The wines – the Grenache-Carignan Bellmunt, the Grenache-Syrah Coma Vella – have an international sheen, with velvety fruit and suave tannins. But they are a world away from the delicate, briar freshness of Mas Martinet’s top cuvée, the 100% Garnacha Els Escurçons, for example. Mas d’en Gil is a formidable operation, exporting 85% of its wines to 43 countries. Its affable owner, Pere Rovira Rovira, seems well aware of the dangers of courting such a market. “We don’t want to be industrial,” he insists. “We want to be artisanal.”
It’s fascinating to see how the next generation, people like Pérez and her husband, Barbier’s son René Jr, and gifted winemakers like Albert Jané of Acústic Celler in Montsant, is continuing to develop the style and explore the possibilities of terroir. They’re not iconoclasts – they have too much respect for their parents for that – yet things are changing.
Take ripeness. Pérez remembers that when she took over at Clos Martinet in the mid-1990s, “we thought that ripe skins and tannins were the key to elevating wines in bottle, the way to achieve longevity. So every vintage we were ripening more and more, then in 1999 I arrived at the maximum,16 degrees of alcohol.”
It was then, Pérez says, that she realised she “was losing something”, remarking that “I was tasting the 1998 vintage all over the world, and everywhere people were making the same wine, and I got the feeling that everything tasted like Priorat.”
The wines had balance of oak and tannin, they were ripe and luscious, but, she felt, they did not reflect their terroir. So she began to work the vineyard, eschewing clones in favour of massal selection, going fully organic, managing the leaf canopy to retain moisture and humidity in the vines. She is also busy regrafting Garnacha and Carignan onto the Syrah and other international varieties planted in the 1990s. In the winery, crucially, she began to reject new oak in favour of large, old barrels, concrete, and clay amphorae. “The wines are finer and more elegant so they don’t need that much oak.” Els Escurçons is now raised exclusively in 300-L amphorae.
Pérez is at pains to point out that although this is a revolution, she is not rejecting the methods of her parents. “The most important thing is what I can keep from my parents, and from older generations, and what I can import from my own generation. But I’m not breaking from the past, I’m adding to it.”
The knowledge base is continually growing. Today’s Priorat winemakers know a good deal more about their terroir than they did 25 years ago. The region’s singular topography (“you‘re always going up and down or right and left” as Pérez puts it), means vineyards with varied orientation and altitude. The new village designation, which was first made official in late 2009, has added an additional level of understanding of terroir.
Priorat’s sister appellation Montsant is following a similar, if less stellar, trajectory. While Priorat has dominated the headlines for its dramatic vistas, its llicorella soils and its stratospheric prices, Montsant vineland has the advantage of being cheaper, and therefore attracting radical young winemakers who can’t afford to buy on the hill.
Montsant
Standing in the village of Gratallops, the spiritual centre of Priorat, it’s easy to see how the two appellations fit together. Priorat rises out of Montsant like a thumb through a donut – the latter, relatively flat, surrounds its mountainous sibling in a perfect arc. The topography is different, the soils are clay, granite and limestone, and the difference in temperatures from north to south allow ‘diversity of expression’, as one winemaker, Pep Aguilar of Celler Comunica, put it. It’s perfect for experimentation. Montsant’s roots are as ancient as Priorat’s (Pliny the Elder was a fan) but producers are just beginning to get a good idea of its terroirs and subzones. “We are in chapter one of the history of the region,” as Aguilar says.
When the DO was established in 2001 there were about 15 producers here, and more than 66 today. Concentrating on indigenous varieties Grenache, Carignan, Ull de Llebre (Tempranillo), Macabeu and Garnacha Blanca (there is only 7% Cabernet Sauvignon in the appellation), they are crafting structured, restrained, ultra-modern wines which are perfectly in tune with the times. Pérez and Barbier Jr also revere Montsant and produce reds and whites there under the label Venus La Universal. René Barbier Sr also has a Montsant wine, Espectacle, a $100.00 cuvée much loved by Parker, and which some would see as overblown – perhaps an indication of how the appellation may develop.
For the moment, Montsant is trendy. “People see it as better-value Priorat,” says Alvaro Ribalta of UK importer Indigo Wine, a Spanish specialist. “If you want a similar style at a fraction of the price, the quality is exemplary.”
The truth is that both DOs are in their infancy. Priorat might have the prices of cru classé Bordeaux or Napa, but its winemakers are still experimenting: René Barbier has amphorae in his cellar; Scala Dei’s winemaker Jordi Vidal is testing out loose-grained Bulgarian oak for his Syrah and Carignan; Josep Pérez is actually returning a parcel of vines to the wild, letting them grow untrained, like creepers.
Perhaps the situation is best summed up by a t-shirt that’s popular amongst the winery workers. It says simply: ‘Priorat – 1000 anys d’història, 60 anys de DO’. One thousand years of history and sixty years as a DO. Watch this space.
