A taste of Priorat

A so|ourn to a small

but significant winp

region sends an

acclaimed authors

Hi'iiil heart and

glass swirling

he 1960s: Living in my bride's home­town of Tarragona, Spain, once—as Imperial Tarraco— the western capital of the Roman Empire. Occasional trips up into the nearby mountains of Priorato (as Priorat was known in those days of the Franco dictatorship, when the Catalan language was for­bidden) for the mountain air, the scen­ery, feasts of grilled lamb and rabbit with local artist friends, and the pow­erful, rough but mouth-filling local jug wine, drunk at meals by the rivulet from glass porrones lifted at arm's length and, at 18 percent alcohol, quite literally a back-country knockout. Best described perhaps as a kind of clumsy ripasso, tasty, dense, dark, with sour-sweet overtones, just about every­thing having gone into the vat. Always brought along gallon garrafas to be filled at the local bodega for a few pesetas, though back home in the lowlands the wine seemed to lose some of its power and clarity, or perhaps our own clarity returned and we could bet­ter judge it for what it was. Took a professional photographer friend along on one occasion to the ancient village of Masroig, said to have Islamic ori­gins, though the area earlier had Ibe­rian and pre-Iberian inhabitants, and among his many photos of the day was one taken in a small barren room with a tall window, a mirror on the wall and a wooden chair, on which I sat for the photo that appears on a couple of my early dust jackets.

1989: Generally acknowledged to be year one of the great Priorat wine revolution. According to the prevailing legend, that was the year the five famous pioneers of the new wave, having gathered together in the tiny mountain village of Gratal-lops (it was a kind of commune back then, they say, with shared winemak-ing facilities and something of a hip­pie atmosphere), produced their first experimental vintage. In their devo­tion, they resembled somewhat those old 12th century Carthusian monks of the Scala Dei ("Ladder of God") priory—whence the region's name— who, praising their divinity, replanted the old Roman terraces, launching the "modern" era of winemaking in the area. The Gratallops Five managed to attach the same mystique to their wines that the monks enjoyed in their time, finding their divinity in the prehistoric convulsions that created their terroir. They would all very rapidly become international superstars: Alvaro Pala-cios of the Rioja Baja family (L'Ermita and Clos Dofi, later renamed Finca Dofi); Rene Barbier of the Barbier winemaking clan (Clos Mogador); Tarragona musician and journalist Carles Pastrana and his oenologist

wife, Mariona Jarque (Clos de L'Obac); the Catalan viti-culturist and

professor Jose Lluis Perez and his philosopher-oenologist daughter Sara (Mas Martinet), Sara now married to Rene Barbier Jr.; and Paris-born Swiss winemaker Daphne Glorian (Clos

Erasmus), drawn to the project by a chance encounter with Palacios and Barbier at an Orlando wine fair ear­lier in the decade.

2007: We are back in Tarragona, vis­iting the family for a week after a long absence, and impulsively we decide to rent a car and visit Priorat for the first time since the 1960s with the whimsi­cal ambition of trying to find that bar­ren room where the photo was taken and see if the mirror and chair are still there, and along the way perhaps walk the hills and vineyards and taste a few of the new wines. By now of course Priorat is the talk of the wine world, prices per bottle can run into the hun­dreds of dollars, Robert Parker with his consistent upper-90s scores is predict­ing the Catalan area will surpass La Rioja and Ribera del Duero as Spain's top wine region, and new wineries are popping up weekly, the number of Pri­orat bodegas rising from 20 in 2000 to more than 80 now, even though production of the entire Priorat wine district is smaller than that of some single Rioja growers, with many more wineries mushrooming at the more ample Montsant fringes. So this is not a journey of discovery but more one of personal inquiry—e.g., what makes

these opulent, full-bodied wines, made mostly of grenache and carignan, not the noblest of varietals, as good as they are? Why are they so expensive? Do they have aging potential? What has

been the impact of big money and new techniques on the locals?—and, as is always the case with wine, has been for millennia upon millennia, oldest story of the human race except that of story itself, one of pleasure. We decide to post ourselves at the

heart of the uprising and book a room in Gratallops itself (pop. 250) at the little three-star country hotel perched high in the center, Cal Llop ("House of the Wolf" or "Wolf's Den"). This turns out to be our most fortunate decision of the week. Not only is it an imagina­tively designed little inn, fondly hand-crafted from an ancient building whose origins are said to date back to the 13th century, looking out over the vineyards and the tumble of tiled roofs below, but its generous, laid-back owners, Cris-tina Jimenez and Waldo Bartolome, refugees from the Madrid hurly-burly and the film-and-television world, are able to turn what was largely a flight of fancy into a more or less sensible proj­ect, organizing for us via their friends a two-day wine tour that ranges from the oldest to the newest, from community cooperatives and youthful garage-wine

makers to the commercial hustlers and dedicated superstars, and including the up-and-coming Montsant wine district, which embraces the more privileged Priorat—as a Montsant winemaker puts it later—as the flesh of a peach embraces its pit. And while Cristina sets up our tastings, Waldo, amused by the whimsy of it, goes to work on finding that room with mirror and chair, the primary clue being that we were visiting that day the local painter Jaume Sabate.

At supper after our first day of vine­yard visits, we also discover that the Cal Llop chef Angel Lopez Bellot is as talented and imaginative as the hotel owners, the accompanying full-bodied wine list like a directory of the region's vineyards and itself an extension of our tastings. We are sharing the restaurant, originally the house stables, with the youngest of the serial Rene Barbiers and

his guests from Chateau Mouton-Rothschild in Bordeaux, a dozen of them perched on a kind of platform just above us, and at the table beside us the romantic young garagist Fredi Torres (no relation to the well-known wine family), whose organic Sao del Coster wines we have sampled earlier in the day in his bodega at the bottom of town, a beat-up old building

buried in the hillside rock and inhab­ited by the nurturing ghosts of wine-makers past, the facility doubling as a location for disco parties, Fredi once having made a living as a DJ and still keeping his hand in. Tonight Fredi is entertaining a pair of voluptuous young Americans, their decolletage the subject of much ogling and comment from the distinguished winemakers above us.

Having apparently learned from Fredi that I may be writing something for this magazine, one of the two women, sisters as it turns out, comes over to introduce herself and, squatting seduc­tively at my feet, recites from memory the poem that she says won the 1988 playboy poetry prize when she was 16. It's called "Orange" and is about licking, sucking, sniffing, stroking, etc., the fruit, then rubbing it all over her body; a classic, as you might say. "And I hadn't even had sex yet!" she says, somewhat in wonderment at her own precociousness. She goes on to tell me her life story, which is not a wonder­ful one, she has had her share of hard knocks, but she is a chin-up sort of kid and always looks on the bright side.

In the line before Pliny the Elder comments in his Natural History on the choice qualities of the wines of Imperial Tarraco, much quoted by writers on

these local wines today (Pliny also has exemplary tales of erudite Roman entrepreneurs buying up land on the cheap, plant­ing modernized vineyards and raking in fortunes), he points out that the land and the soil are "of primary importance, and not the grape, and that it is quite superfluous to attempt to enumerate all the varieties of every kind, seeing that the same vine, transplanted to sev-

eral places, is productive or features and characteristics of quite opposite natures." Terroir, as it's called in the trade, especially if restricted to the soil and weather, is indeed the secret to the peculiar power of the Priorat wines and is what distinguishes them from their Montsant neighbors and all others besides. The steep terraced hillsides, some of (continued on page 170)

PRIOPAT

(continued from page 84) them originally created by the Romans, if not llie Greeks before them, are composed almost entirely of layered gray slate known locally as Ilirorrlh. most of what we think of as dirt—the organic stuff—having long since been blown or washed away. Virtually nothing but grapes can grow here, and they, as one grower said, "are made to suffer." Rainfall averages about 24 inches a year, which is enough, but the summers are dry and hot (though often cool at night), and slate's gixxl drainage means that vines have to reach deep to find the prx>led water, their roots' little tendrils meanwhile nibbling at the slate all the way down, picking up those trace elements that have made these wines so famous. Which in turn means that old vines with deeper nx>Ls have the edge here, and these are the plantings, mostly aban­doned over the years because of low pro­duction, that the Big Five and their bandwagon successors have been snapping up and reviving. Crenache typically makes a soft, fruity wine often lacking color, tannin and acid. Carignan, though meatier, is responsible for some of the worst wines on the market. But both varietals seem to achieve real stature when grown on the very old low-yielding sines planted long ago

in these mountainous slate soils of l'riorat, their marriage in the vats bringing on the final epiphany that has so enriched their matchmakers and delighted the wedding guests. In all the wines we tasted, if not overly oaked, it was the special mineral characteristics ol the slate soil, together with the concentrated intensity of old-vine grapes, that distinguished them.

Of course, the vinification processes have changed too, and that's what makes these wines different from the "Prionuo" of old, and also more expensive to produce. These people are not local farmers fermenting age-stained caskfuls of squashed grape juice in the lamily manner, they are university-trained oenologists using modern equip­ment and scientific methods, and though it may be less fun drinking with them, they are creating qu;dity site-specific iv'ka dt terrrr. as they say in these hills, unlike any grown elsewhere in the world. They sometimes make judicious use of recently planted "for­eign" grapes like syrah, merlot and cabernet sauvignon lor added structure and aging potential, each with their own recipes, and they each have their own individual philos­ophies about fermentation and barrel-aging time. etc.. but they all Ickus on low-yield old vines of native varietals (both the grenache and cdrigtuin, now common everywhere, originated in Spain), letting the grapes

ripen i lull mammy and men latxinousiy hand-selecting them at the further expense ol quantity. Many also adhere lo organic methods, eschewing chemical leitili/ers. herbicides and pesticides, their vmevards delightfully alive then with poppies and asters and other wildllowers. insects and small creatures, but also requiring more personal attention. And the more rare thev take, ol course, the higher the production costs: probably at least double that, per bot­tle, of. say, Bordeaux. Burguiuh or Napa. Piedmont or the Rhone, and vasdv more than lowland high-yield plonk. Quality Pri-oral. whether or not it's the equal of other prestige wines, will always be. necessarily, relatively expensive.

And is it the equal? Well, these wines are truly delicious and strikingly distinctive, but their impact on I Ik- palate, while intense, tends so fin to be up-front and lairlv short­lived, explosively mouth-tilling but lacking back-ol-the-lhroat complexity and .1 long finish. Which may in the future mean more syrah and cab in the mix when those new-plantings grow longer beards. ()lder wines from the 1990s tasted on other occasions seem not lo have matured into something new but merely lo have decorously declined, though I'd be pleased to be offered a sip of an exception, and am well aware that these winemakers. committed to craft and jealous of their fame, are working on this. On the other hand, middle- and lower-priced Priorats uniformly outclass their equivalents in Bordeaux or Burgundy—or Rioja, for that matter—which are often these days massively disappointing. Wines made from grapes grown in this tsrroir, if carefully made, are from fust dowering something special and. il aftordable. are virtually guaranteed lo gratify. As demand increases and more new vines are planted on irrigated terraces, the quality diflerence between the original bl<x kbuster wines and lesser newcomers will increase, but lor now the staggering cost ol the big-name Ixxttings will probably not seem justifiable to any but the very rich, willing and able like- emperors of old lo squander lottunes on nuance. For the rest of us: We sample what we find on the shelves al the lower price ranges a bottle at a time and hope tor big surprises, grab­bing a hunc h ol il when we Imcl one.

On our final night, while pontificating about all this in the little Cal Mop hotel bar in company with others, includ­ing Cristina and Waldo and Angel and Frcdi and his girls (more poetry), Waldo tells me thai, through his own doctor in Masroig. the only one in Masroig. he has learned thai the painter ]aume Satiate lias died ("Yes, eccentric fellow, said he never needed doctors, and I buried him..."), but his niece Carmen, whom we recall as an effervescent teenager with a youthful artistic talent of her own, is still in town, and she remembers well our visit of 40 years ago and would love lo see us again.

So, the following day. before dropping clown mil of the mountains, we meet up with Waldo al the dcxtor's Masroig office

during his lunch break and walk over to the nicies house, discovering en route that the doctor went to ined school with the son of my wile's k and he said that. yes. Bob Coover (he called me Hob!) is an important American writer. She was very impressed. The pres­ident's name, she says, was Peter.

Her husband. Felip, turns up. a wine-maker himsell with the Masroig coopera­tive, and over a glass of his nephew's own unlabelcd Uxtling. the last of our mountain tastings, we talk about the downside of the invasion of the big-time wine entrepre­neurs, how it may be improving the wine but, as the lands are bought up by strang­ers and the wine transformed into a high-end product lor the international market, it is also bringing an end to the I'riorat of old and is impoverishing as many as it is enriching. Among the wineries we have visited is the cooperative ofCapcanes (best known for its special sideline ol kosher wines), whose members decided a decade or so ago to band together and hang on to their lands and winery rather than sell mil to the intruders, lo survive, they had to expand and modernize, and that cost a lot of money in the form of a sleep hank loan, meaning they all had to mortgage their properly, houses, cars, whatever they had, a great risk, and only three months ago was that loan at last p.ml oil. so we found them in .11 clcbralivc iikmkI, doing well, and able still lo sell many of their authentic if 'modest I'rioral wines at supermarket prices. Felip says yes, they are lo be congratulated and they serve as a model for others, but one not easy to follow, lor they went through some very painful limes and there were years ol billei 'disputes and deep unhealahle nils, provoked l>\ the tear of losing every­thing, lew others will go that hard route. The corporate wine giants are headed this way. .mil the landgrab is on. Most will either sell up or Ixi'onie small producers for the big wineries. But. he shrugs, what can you do. lift.* moves on. Theonlv thing that never changes, we all agree, is change itself, and we lift a glass to that—or maybe, because all change, even as something new is born, is a kind ol death, to Ix' mocked m.ivlx- but not lo Ix- cheered, just to the lifting of glasses.