TThe first storm of winter had done its worst just days before I arrived in Priorato last November. In four hours, more rain than is usual during an entire year had washed out dirt roads, hillside terracing, and young vines in this, the poorest and most isolated corner of Catalonia. But the region’s winegrowers were in high spirits, buoyed by their first impression of the year’s new wine. The rain marked the end of a summer that had taken the vines to the limit of their endurance, and it was already obvious that the resulting wines would be concentrated and powerfully aromatic. The essence, one might say, of Priorato.
Tucked away in hill country west of Tarragona, Priorato was long the butt of local politicians’ jokes. So when Joan Clos, the mayor of Barcelona, recently announced that he wanted to establish, within the city’s limits, a municipal vineyard “like the one in Montmartre” and then went on to say, “except that I want ours to produce a great wine. A wine this city can be proud of. A wine like Priorato’s Cims de Porrera,” it made an impression.
For Sara Perez, who produces that wine, the recognition was gratifying. For Priorato, it was something of a miracle. Though it’s not the first time that God’s finger has strayed there. In the 12th century, a local man claimed to have seen a congregation of angels working together on a hillside, each one carrying grapes up and down a great staircase to heaven. An account of the incident so affected Alfonso II of Aragón that, in 1163, he established on that very spot Spain’s first Carthusian monastery—called, appropriately, Scala Dei, or “Stairway of God.” Monks began planting vines, the first in the region since the Romans had packed up and left, centuries before.
Priorato’s secret lies in its schist—a crumbly gray-green slate that forces the Grenache and Carignan vines traditionally grown there to send roots down 40 feet or more in search of water. The nutrients and minerals they draw from that depth contribute to the intensity of the wine, giving it a strength that throws into relief the rich fruit and ripe, velvety tannins that are Priorato’s hallmark.
A mix of Grenache and Carignan is common all around the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and France because the two varieties complement each other. You can see this just by looking at the vines. The Grenache is open, and its oval grapes hang in loose bunches. Its wine, though perfumed and soft, is equally unstructured and tends to fade quickly. A Carignan vine, on the other hand, is tight and knotty, and there are deep indentations in its leaves. Its thick-skinned grapes hang in compact, cylindrical bunches, producing a wine that can seem rigid and even raw when the vines are young but that gains in suppleness as the vines—and the wine—mature. Used together, Grenache and Carignan complete each other, the gentle finish of one braced by the structure of the other.
Over a dinner of roast kid and a glass of Cims de Porrera 1998, I talked with Salus Alvarez, the mayor of Porrera, one of the 12 scattered villages that produce Priorato wine. He told me that because of its rich texture and heady mountain flavor, it had been in demand as far back as the 16th century. Alvarez likes to browse through old letters and accounts stowed away in his neighbors’ attic trunks. “I learn a lot,” he said. “For example, I recently found a 17th-century sheet of instructions for blending wine for the Spanish colonies in South America. Another, prepared 100 years later, proposed a rule that would have restricted Priorato wine to shipment in bottle to protect its reputation.
“It used to give me a strange feeling,” he added, “to be looking at evidence of past prosperity while at the same time watching the decline of our village. The vines were being abandoned, and the people were disappearing with them. A hundred years ago Porrera had a population of more than 2,000. Today it has fewer than 300. It has been the same everywhere in Priorato.”
Phylloxera ruined Priorato, as it did many other marginal regions with labor-intensive hillside vineyards. They all had difficulty getting started again, and some never did. Priorato’s growers made things easier on themselves by changing their varietal emphasis. They planted more Carignan and less Grenache, even though this gave their wine a harsher style. Carignan sets fruit more reliably than Grenache—that tightness carries through—and even in the difficult conditions of Priorato, it will usually yield twice as much fruit as Grenache. The growers sold land to finance the replanting, and, to supplement what they could afford to pay them in cash, gave plots to their workers. By the 1950s, there were hundreds of tiny holdings—mostly planted with Carignan—and control of local wine production shifted from the estates to the cooperative cellars that sprang up in most of the villages.
The cooperatives were there to make wine, not to market it. But when shipped in bulk for others to blend, even Priorato fetches only a commodity price. The growers tried to cover their expenses by boosting yields. Quality fell, and revenues fell further. But the fundamentals of Priorato’s past success remained: schist, exposure to a Mediterranean sun, and altitude. It needed only a spark to set things in motion again. In fact, there were two: Jose-Luis Perez, Sara Perez’s father, and René Barbier. Perez, a wiry biologist now in his sixties, arrived in 1981 as director of the local school of agriculture. He fought for viticulture programs, hoping they would give the young an incentive to stay and a chance to succeed. In 1980, the bearded and heavyset Barbier—grandson of a French négociant who had moved to Tarragona from the Rhône Valley at the end of the 19th century—bought an abandoned property in the Priorato village of Gratallops. He renamed the steeply pitched vineyard, which came with a ruined house, Clos Mogador.
Though trained in Bordeaux, Barbier knew Priorato well. As a child he had accompanied his father on trips there to buy wine. Friends from Tarragona—writers and painters mostly—spent time with him at Gratallops, helping him salvage old vines and nurse them back into production. Carles and Mariona Pastrana, now owners of Clos de l’Obac, next door, were among them. Others, romantics perhaps, but also excited by the possibilities they saw in these old vines, bought vineyards. At about $100 an acre at the time, land was cheap enough. They restored, replanted, and extended the vineyards, turning to each other for help and support, and to Jose-Luis Perez for advice. Having caught their enthusiasm, Perez, too, bought land and, in 1986, planted the vines that would eventually produce his Clos Martinet.
Some, having made a start, got cold feet and pulled back, selling their vines to each other or to newcomers. That’s how Alvaro Palacios—son of the Rioja producer with whom Barbier had worked and by then a close friend—came to acquire Finca Dofi in 1989. Strapped for cash, they all thought of themselves as pioneers. (Palacios, too, was on his own. His father, having tried to discourage him from what he saw as a risky venture, refused to finance it. For several years Palacios traveled five days a week as a barrel salesman so that he could support himself and devote his weekends to his vineyard.)
The group shared resources. In fact, their sense of camaraderie was so strong in those days that it seemed perfectly natural that their 1989 vintage—their first—should be made in common as a single cuvée in a winery they had jointly set up in a former sheep shed. They continued to share the sheep-shed winery until 1992, but after that first 1989 cuvée, they made their wine independently of one another. Or they had René Barbier make it for them. As they labored together in those early years for what had become a common, passionately pursued cause, they did everything themselves. They must have looked to outsiders like an incarnation of that 12th-century vision.
In fact, given the limitations of their annual production—at that time it was only in the hundreds of cases—it might have taken years for outsiders even to notice what was going on. But in April 1992, in preparation for the Barcelona Olympic Games, Gault-Millau published a guide to Catalonia that included a thumbnail sketch of René Barbier and an account of the revolution he had instigated in Priorato. In giving the 1989 vintages of his Clos Mogador and the Pastranas’ Clos de l’Obac appropriately identical ratings of 18/20, the reviewer described their explosive fruit and rich texture. He also warned his readers that the wines, difficult to find, were sold, when available, almost drop by drop. The response was predictable—everyone felt that he or she had to taste it. The new Priorato was launched.
Barbier and his friends had sought out and bought old plantings of Grenache, and in an effort to restore the varietal balance that had been lost decades earlier, they planted yet more of it. Of the 1,000 hectares (2,400 acres) of productive vines in Priorato, well over 300 are now Grenache, more than twice as many as in 1980. There is still plenty of Carignan, but the vines are mature because little of this variety has been planted. There has been a preference to look to three classic French varieties—Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and Merlot—for the structure Grenache lacks, with an initial enthusiasm for Cabernet Sauvignon gradually shifting to Syrah because of its less imposing varietal character. Clos Mogador, Clos de l’Obac, Finca Dofi, L’Ermita, and Erasmus—estates prominent in the revival—all use, to stunning effect, one or other (or all three) of these French varieties rather than Carignan. When the proportions are right and the Carignan fruit is from really mature vines, however, traditional combinations of Grenache and Carignan can be equally impressive. In fact, the elegant and distinctive 1998 Cims de Porrera that I’d enjoyed so much on the first evening of my visit (quite possibly the very wine that had inspired Joan Clos) was predominantly Carignan with only one third Grenache and a dash of Cabernet Sauvignon for seasoning.
Success breeds success. Torres, the leading wine producer in neighboring Penedès, has recently bought land in Priorato, and Codorniu has taken a stake in Scala Dei, one of the region’s older (and larger) estates. But the most heartening effect has been on small growers. As recently as five years ago, the Priorato cooperatives were distributing 40 pesetas (20 cents) a kilo for grapes to their members. Today, depending on the quality of the fruit, most growers in Priorato can expect to receive from 300 to 600 pesetas. In 1990, Alvaro Palacios of Finca Dofi started to buy small lots of grapes from the owners of old vines to make Les Terrasses, a cuvée distinct from his own estate wines. His aim was to augment his production in order to justify building a modern winery. The price Palacios was willing to pay for high-quality grapes (Carignan as well as Grenache) put pressure on the cooperatives to rethink their strategies so as to avoid seeing their best fruit simply slip away from them.
In 1991, five small cooperatives formed the Vinicola del Priorato, with a new and well-equipped central winery at Gratallops. Although they had a difficult start—old habits are hard to break—a new management team has, since 1995, introduced a system of paying members for quality rather than volume. “We still sell in bulk any wine that doesn’t satisfy us,” Jordi Miró, the sales director told me. “But that’s now no more than 5 percent of our annual production.” Most of the 25,000 cases Vinicola sells each year is Onix, a robust and lively blend based on the fruit from old Grenache and Carignan vines.
Other cooperatives have chosen to form alliances with successful producers to get the technical and marketing skills they need. Through just such an arrangement, the village cooperative in Poboleda now has the help of Joan Maria Riera, a talented young winemaker who worked for a time at Saintsbury in California’s Carneros. Its new partners have upgraded the equipment in the cooperative’s modest quarters, and although members still have the right to deliver all their grapes there—that was part of the deal—selection is rigorous, and about a quarter of the wine is sold off in bulk.
“We give the growers all the help we can,” Riera told me. “And by way of encouragement we routinely pay 500 pesetas a kilo for impeccable fruit.” Riera imposes strict organic cultivation standards on all the cooperative’s members. “All our wine is organic,” he said, “and the Swiss and German authorities send inspectors here regularly.” All the reds are traditional blends of Grenache and Carignan, but the best of them, bottled as Mas Igneus, usually contain small proportions of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Syrah.
Best known of the cooperative partnerships is Cims de Porrera. The Perez family, with partner Luis Llach, rents the village cooperative’s winery, where the huge underground cement tanks in which the wine used to be made have been turned into vaults housing French oak barrels. The 52 member growers, who sell their grapes to the winery, cultivate a total of 54 hectares (130 acres) of vines, spread over 150 different plots. “They’re all at different altitudes, with different exposures, and often with the Grenache and the Carignan mixed together,” Sara Perez told me. “We do our best to pick the two varieties separately anyway,” she said, “because they don’t ripen at the same time. We judge ripeness by the taste of the skins. When the fruit is ripe, the aroma tells you so. It was nature’s way of attracting animals to eat the fruit when the seeds were ready. We follow the same rule, and it seems to work for us, too.”
PRIORATO WINES IN THE UNITED STATESBecause of their limited production, distribution of Priorato wines is still uneven. Availability varies from state to state, as do vintages and prices. Some wines, like Alvaro Palacios’s Clos L’Ermita, mostly presold before arrival, are rarely found on retailers’ lists. With regard to recent Priorato vintages, 1998 was a classic year, and the wines are firm but elegant. The wines of both 1997 and 1999 are forward, but the 1999s have a plumper quality. The balance and harmony of any Priorato wine depends on the vineyard, the age of the vines, and the skill of the winemaker, but there is usually a difference between wines made with a generous proportion of French varieties and little Carignan, and those made exclusively, or almost exclusively, from Grenache and Carignan, Priorato’s traditional grapes. Very ripe Grenache, especially, gives an enticing aroma and flavor of dried fruits (figs, raisins), which suits the rounder style of its wine but is often masked in the presence of Cabernet Sauvignon. The bouquet of a new-style Priorato is usually brighter and, depending on varietal proportions, more berrylike.
Mostly or exclusively Grenache and Carignan:
Barranc des Closos Negre 1997, 1998, and 1999 ($14)
Vinicola del Priorato, Onix, 1998 and 1999 ($12.50)
Cims de Porrera 1997 and 1998 ($37.50)
Alvaro Palacios, Les Terrasses, 1998 ($25)
Mas Igneus 1 12 (12 months in a new barrel) 1997 ($42)
Mas Igneus 2 06 (6 months, second-year barrel) 1998 ($20)
Made with varying but significant proportions of Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah:
Clos Martinet 1998 ($60)
Gran Clos 1998 ($52.50)
Clos de l’Obac 1998 ($60)
René Barbier, Clos Mogador, 1998 ($52.50)
Clos Erasmus1998 ($60)