Priorat, In Progress
The new wave is happening in Catalonia's prestige appellation. Plus, 14 bottle recommendations.
A couple of years ago, I got a rare opportunity to drink some baller Priorat. The ballerest of the ballerest, to be honest. This was at Barcelona Wine Week, at a tasting called “The Magnificent Seven of the Wonderful Priorat,” and all the big guns of Catalonia’s prestigious old guard were there. The lineup included such legendary bottles as the 2021 Álvaro Palacios L’Ermita, 2020 Clos i Terrasses Clos Erasmus, and 2020 Familia Nin-Ortiz “Nit de Nin” Mas d’en Cacador—all three have won 100-point scores, and retail for $1,250, $300, and $180 respectively.
“The Magnificent Seven of the Wonderful Priorat” was definitely not a subtle tasting. The various wines were a mix of single-varietal garnacha or carignan, as well as blends, and you could legitimately call these reds “bruisers,” concentrated, ripe, and tannic. Testosterone seemed to course through the conference room at Fira de Barcelona. Most of the wines spent 14 to 18 months in oak, and a few had international varieties like syrah or sabernet sauvignon in the mix. Along with high prices and high scores came high alcohol by volume. The 2019 Mas Doix “1902” Tossal d’en Bou ($500) weighed in at 14.5 percent abv, while 2019 Clos Mogador ($120) turned the dial even higher at 15 percent. Meanwhile, the 2019 Celler Vall Llach ‘Mas de la Rosa’ ($300) clocked in at 15.5 percent.
These are the kinds of macho reds that put Priorat on the world wine map in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it became the darling of critics like Robert Parker. Though this big style of wine is not my normal cup of tea, I appreciate the excellence in something like the Álvaro Palacios L’Ermita. But I can see why I don’t find so much Priorat on the lists of popular wine bars and restaurants in the U.S. These grand wines feel a little out of step today.
Still, during this high-octane tasting, one particular bottle stood out. Not for its muscles and machismo and BDE, but for the opposite. I had to chuckle when the wine journalist moderating the tasting told the audience it was “muy feminina.”
That wine, 2021 Terroir al Límit “Les Manyes,” ($235) is made with garnacha peluda, a rare variant of garnacha (literally “hairy grenache”), from 60-year-old vines grown at more than 2,600 feet elevation. Les Manyes spends only eight months aging in cement, not wood, and has only 13.5 percent abv—the bare minimum alcohol level permitted in Priorat. Tasting this wine is a revelation: Sure, you can call it “pretty.” But it’s unbelievably complex, with delicate, seamless layers of berry, rose, spice, herb, smoke, crushed stone, etched together by incredible freshness and tension. Though Terroir al Límit is only 20 years old, Les Manyes has already won its share of worldwide fame with critics. (The 2016 earned 100 points, if you care about that sort of thing.)
Yet for me and many other Spanish wine lovers, Terroir al Límit represents something more: the next wave of wines from Priorat, along with producers such as Sara Pérez of Mas Martinet, newer luminaries such as Ferrer Bobet or Josep Grau, up-and-coming family estates such as Marco Abella and Trossos del Priorat, biodynamic wineries such as Hodgkinson and Clos Pachem, and natural-leaning winemakers such as Gemma Miró and Iduvina Olmdeo at Mas d’en Perí.
