Priorat, Spain: Bridging The Past

Australian Wine Selector - Maturation 2004

The stainless steel tanks in the Alvaro Palacios winery are as modern as the equipment at Clos Mogador is rustic, yet their proprietors have been equally instrumental in turning around the fortunes of Spain’s Priorat region. In 1989, Alvaro Palacios took a gamble in leaving his family’s prestigious Rioja winery, Palacios Remondo, to pin his hopes on an area that until then had been producing mainly bulk wine. Today, his strikingly modern winery is a work of art and he lays claim to being the producer of what is probably Spain’s most expensive wine, L’Ermita, which sells from $700 to $1000 a bottle – if you can get it.

A decade before Palacios’s arrival in the region, Rene Barbier had fallen in love with Priorat, a ruggedly beautiful mountainous region which rises up from the coast south of Barcelona. He recognised its potential for winemaking and having lost his family brand to the giant Freixenet group, set up Clos Mogador, an artisan operation where the wine is pressed between straw mats and fermented in open barrels. Each of his vines produces just one bottle of wine, which unlike Alvaro Palacios’s, sees not a skerrick of stainless steel.

The two producers are the pioneers of Priorat’s modern wine industry, turning the spotlight on a region that has long been overshadowed by more familiar names such as Rioja, Ribera del Duero and Jerez. Together with other producers such as Carles Pastrana (Clos de L’Obac), Jose Luis Perez Verdú (Clos Martinet) and Daphne Glorian (Clos Erasmus) – the group even shared vinification facilities in the early years – they have raised the benchmark to produce big, bold reds with plenty of character and an unprecedented elegance. The high price tag of Priorat wine becomes a little easier to understand when you take into account the wild and rocky terrain it comes from.

One of Spain’s more than 40 Denominations of Origin, Priorat has some of the most dramatically situated vineyards in Europe, with terraced vineyards cut into the steep hillsides up to 800m high. The region produces some of the country’s best olive oil, figs and hazelnuts but its low-yielding trees and vines are planted on almost inaccessible slopes. The wine’s blockbuster nature is attributed to the heat-retaining qualities of the region’s licorella soil. Made up of quartzite and slate, it looks unforgiving but is in fact ideal for wine growing. Nature provides additional help, with big variations in temperature between day and night and summer and winter. The temperate dry climate has a Mediterranean influence.

“The reason these wines are standing so well after all these years is that the estate faces north-east,” says public relations spokesman, Joan Asens, pointing to the 100-year-old L’Ermita vines, planted on terraces in a natural ampitheatre in the highest part of Gratallops, heart of the Priorat DO. “It’s a hot dry climate but every day it gets sea breezes. The soil is like a sponge. It absorbs all the humidity but it acts as protection for the roots. The slate regulates the water content of the soil. It gives a great stability to the vintage because of the stable humidity. There are no differences in yields from year to year.” The L’Ermita vines yield just 500g to 1kg of grapes per vine. Mules are used to pick them “and the price of mules has gone up dramatically”, says Mr Asens, further explaining the price tag.

Although the terraces are more than 300 years old, the vines were planted after phylloxera wiped out the entire local crop in the 1890s. It wasn’t the first time the industry had had its ups and downs. Winemaking in the area dates back to ancient times and had already undergone several phases. Destroyed by centuries of Visigothic and Moorish occupation, the industry resumed in the 12th century when Carthusian monks established a monastery in the area and began producing wine. This accounts for the region’s name, Priorat, meaning priory, and its DO symbol, “God’s Staircase” flanked with angels and grapes. President of the Priorat DO, Salus Alvarez, says there was a flourishing industry in the 1400s and records of grape purchases still exist from the mid-1500s.

From 1835, there was a renewed expansion, and then a lull after the phylloxera plague until Rene Barbier and his friends began recuperating the old vines and planting new ones. Today, there are 43 wineries in the region, with a total of 1500ha planted. Priorat wines have traditionally been a blend of varieties, and until recently, most plantings were of carinena and grenache. Nowadays, these account for only about 30 per cent each, with cabernet sauvignon, merlot and shiraz becoming increasingly important. Only about seven per cent of plantings are white varieties.

The direction of the new Priorat is clearly expressed in Rene Barbier’s Clos Mogador, first made from his own grapes in 1992, though earlier vintages were made from purchased fruit. Whereas earlier vintages were made almost entirely of grenache, the 2001 vintage was a blend of 37 per cent grenache, 30 per cent cabernet sauvignon, 20 per cent shiraz and 13 per cent carinena. “I never imagined I would use carinena but finally in 1999 I realised [it] was really good,” he said, crediting it for giving the wine its glorious colour and attractive notes of violets and wild berries. About 10 cases of Clos Mogador are shipped to Australia each year through Fine Wines of Europe.

Barbier says the Mogador name is a “tale of the trauma of the displacement of his family”. The family had been winemakers in France for many generations until phylloxera drove his great-grandfather, Leon Barbier, to Spain where he established the company that was eventually sold to Freixenet. With the family heritage all but lost, Barbier bought a former cattle property near Gratallops and named it Mogador after the estate the family had owned in France. “I had nothing left from my family so I thought I could use the name to show I could still make the wine of my roots. I decided to call it Clos, which means enclosed, not because it’s enclosed by walls, but by vegetation.”

Reflecting the terroir of the property is his driving principle. With an annual production of 24,000 bottles, he makes his wine by a painstaking process in which he hand-sorts the grapes, vinfiying them batch by batch in open barrels, using no filtration and only bottling them when there is a new moon “because the movements are made better [at that time]”. When he arrived in Priorat, everyone was making red wine using the age-old technique of pressing the grapes between straw mats; now, he says, he is virtually on his own in doing it this way.

Barbier’s dedication has rubbed off on fellow winemakers in the region, not least being Daphne Glorian who was born in France, raised in Switzerland and never imagined herself making wine until she met Barbier. He convinced her to buy land in Priorat and in 1990 she produced her first vintage of Clos Erasmus. The 1997 vintage is rich and powerful yet smooth and elegant. In a good year, Glorian makes just 5000 bottles. It’s a far cry from Alvaro Palacios, which produces around 210,000 bottles at its ultra-modern winery in Gratallops. Palacios spent two years at Château Pétrus in Bordeaux and from the outset, aimed to produce world-class wines by using fruit from low-yielding old vines and by applying modern winemaking techniques.

Although he has carinena, cabernet sauvignon, shiraz and merlot planted, he is particularly enamoured with grenache and unquestionably his finest acquisition was the 1.3ha L’Ermita vineyard bought in 1993. The first L’Ermita was produced that year and around 3-4000 bottles are made each year, its price putting it into the collector’s league. The 2001 L’Ermita, a seductive blend of 80 per cent grenache, 15 per cent cabernet sauvignon and 5 per cent carinena, was aged in French oak for 20 months and has intense concentration, depth and complexity.

If L’Ermita is the cream of the crop, Alvaro Palacios has another treat in store with its Finca Dofi, a blend of 50 per cent grenache, 25 per cent cabernet sauvignon and the rest shiraz and merlot. First produced in 1989, it sells for upwards of $100 a bottle. The company buys fruit from about 20 growers for its more widely available Les Terasses range. The president of the Priorat DO, Salus Alvarez, is the consultant winemaker for Celler Vall-Llach, whose 2000 Vall-Llach is exported to 14 countries. Described by Alvarez - in the delightful way that the Spanish do - as being produced with “no molestation”, it’s an enormous wine, made from 60 per cent carinena, 25 per cent merlot and 15 per cent cabernet sauvignon.

Other Priorat wines worth seeking out are the 2000 Mas Doix, 2000 Montsalvat, 2000 Iugiter Seleccio which has the aroma of a Barossa shiraz, and 2000 Planots made by Celler Cal Pla, a family estate with a long tradition of winemaking. Soon to arrive in Australia is the 2000 Morlanda, made by Freixenet, a particularly elegant blend of 60 per cent grenache, 30 per cent carinena and 10 per cent cabernet sauvignon.

Coastal towns and cities south of Barcelona, such as Tarragona or Sitges, make a good base for exploring the Priorat wine region. While few of the wineries have cellar door facilities, the wines are widely available in local bottle shops. Vinateria Aguilo in Falset has a good selection of Priorat wines, as does the excellent La Boqueria market in Barcelona.

© Christine Salins

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