Terroir Priorat & Montsant: the black core and its ring

Priorat: terraces of black stone

In the south of Priorat, between the villages of El Lloar and Bellmunt, architect Alfredo Arribas discovered abandoned terraces in 2001, planted with vines over a hundred years old and still on their own roots. Phylloxera had spared them because the Llicorella slate was too poor and too steep for an infestation to be worthwhile. From these terraces, Portal del Priorat now crafts wines that reveal the elegant side of Priorat: yields of roughly one kilogram of grapes per vine, early harvesting, spontaneous fermentation and no new barriques. Gotes del Priorat offers aromas of violet, garrigue and wet slate; Somni, Catalan for “dream”, blends Cariñena and Syrah into Mediterranean spice tempered by cooling minerality. Arribas sums up the terroir in a single memorable phrase: Slate shapes the wine more profoundly than wood.

What exactly Llicorella is, and why it has relatives stretching from the Mosel to the Douro Valley, is explored in our chapter on Europe’s slate wines.

Gratallops, Porrera, Torroja: villages of the new classics

Further into the heart of the appellation, around the villages of Gratallops and Porrera, the region’s recent history grows denser. In 1989, Álvaro Palacios and René Barbier persuaded their friend Daphne Glorian to invest all her savings in old Garnacha vines across seventeen terraces near Gratallops. The result was Clos i Terrasses — and Clos Erasmus, Priorat’s first 100-point wine: pure Llicorella slate in the Escales vineyard site, vines over eighty years old, and a maximum of twelve barriques per year. Since 2004, Glorian has farmed biodynamically, supported by Ester Nin — which leads to the next chapter. Nin, who gained her initial experience at Clos Erasmus, now works with Carles Ortiz under the name Familia Nin Ortiz, tending steep slopes around Porrera so rugged that they are ploughed by mule — a practice unseen there since the 1960s. “Biodynamic since day one” is printed on every cork; Nit de Nin comes from north-facing vines rooted in pure slate, some over a century old, while Planetes Blanc, made from the rare Cariñena Blanca, ranks among Spain’s most distinctive white wines.

In Gratallops itself, Trossos del Priorat delivers precisely what its name promises: “Trossos”, Catalan for “pieces” — eight parcels, each with its own microclimate, spread across 21 hectares of organically farmed Llicorella. Oenologist Eva Escudé captures the region’s hierarchy in a single sentence: “One of the greatest mistakes is to attach too much importance to the oenologist — what matters most is having outstanding grapes.” Meanwhile, in Torroja, Terroir al Limit, founded by Munich-born Dominik Huber together with South African Eben Sadie, farms fifteen hectares biodynamically, using whole-bunch fermentation without pigeage and one of the earliest harvests in the region; the wines follow a Burgundian model, organised into village and single-vineyard cuvées. At the pinnacle stands Les Manyes, awarded 100 points: a Priorat of remarkable finesse, scented with violet and wet slate.

The Border: A Few Metres, Two Worlds

How quickly the bedrock changes is illustrated by the sister project of Terroir al Limit that has incorporated the border into its name: Terroir Sense Fronteres, “Terroir without Borders”. Some plots lie just a few hundred metres from the Priorat slopes, yet instead of schist, the vines here are rooted in loose, sandy-clay soils, and the less stringent rules of the DO Montsant allow for greater experimentation. In the cellar there is no destemmer and no barriques: the grapes are entirely foot-trodden with their stems and fermented in 400-litre terracotta amphorae or concrete tanks, with neither fining nor filtration. At the heart of it all is the Les Montalts vineyard at 800 metres — four hectares of 45-year-old Garnacha bush vines from which Guix Vermell is born, “red gypsum”, named after the colour of the soil. The Negre displays wild herbs and red berries, while the white Brisat from Macabeu offers a saline minerality more reminiscent of Burgundy than of powerful Spain.

Cornudella de Montsant: The Coolest Corner

At the very north of the DO, in Cornudella de Montsant at 700 metres above sea level, altitude and significant diurnal temperature variation produce the freshest, most floral wines of the region. Here, on red clay with gypsum veins, grow the 50- to 60-year-old Garnacha and Cariñena vines from which Tatjana Pećerić — winemaker at Terroir al Limit — crafts her personal project Coreografia; a winemaker who toured France as a dancer before studying oenology in Montpellier. Her Pas de deux is a duet of Garnacha and Cariñena: one ferments with wild yeasts in clay amphorae, the other spontaneously in stainless steel; after six months of separate ageing, both are blended and bottled unfiltered. In the glass, red berries and a hint of violet hover above the saline minerality of the gypsum soil.

In the same high-altitude zone, around Cornudella and Siurana, the north-facing sites of Vins Nus lie between 700 and 820 metres on yellow clay soils. “Naked Wines” is the translation of the name, implying a philosophy of subtraction: no extraction, barely any wood, no sulphur — only amphorae, patience and old Grenache pruned en gobelet. The Siuralta Orange from Grenache Gris undergoes brief maceration in amphora, while the InStable series bears numbers rather than names and Calder mobiles on the label. For this estate, Montsant is not a copy of Priorat but its antithesis: lightness over power, acidity over tannin.

The South: Centenary Vines Between Sand and Limestone

Behind Vins Nus stands the same Alfredo Arribas as behind Portal del Priorat — and his eponymous estate farms over 80 hectares spanning both appellations, many vines on original rootstocks. His single-vineyard wines spell out the soils of southern Montsant: Trossos Vells comes from century-old vines on sandy and clay soils, Trossos Sants from ancient Grenache vines on calcareous subsoil, and Gotes del Montsant proves that freshness in one of Spain’s driest regions arises from altitude, cool nights and picking at precisely the right moment.

Finally, in Darmós, at 125 to 250 metres and less than twenty miles from the Mediterranean, coarse-grained limestone emerges, interspersed with clay and chalk. Here Josep Maria Anguera carries on Casa Gabriel — Vinyes d’en Gabriel, whose vines have been grown without herbicides or synthetic fertilisers since the 19th century; the estate has been farmed biodynamically since 2004. Roots plunge up to eight metres deep into the limestone, and the neighbours are not vineyards but almond and olive groves. The oldest Samsó vines are over ninety years old, and a single century-old Tempranillo beside the ancient well still bears fruit to this day. The flagship Mans de Samsó, a pure Carignan from the oldest parcels, is produced in just a few hundred bottles a year.

At a glance: the soils of the two appellations