Tarragona, Chapter Two: Priorat

The City of Tarragona is the capital of the province by the same name. The province has 10 comarques or counties. Four of these counties, Baix Penedès, Conca de Barberà, Priorat, and Terra Alta are also Denominacions d’Origen for wine. This post is about the region of Priorat. (The county of Priorat also encompasses a second and younger DO: Montsant.)

Priorat, which in Catalan means prior or monastery, has to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. The region comprises a gorgeous valley inside the horseshoe-shaped Montsant range. Rolling hills are flanked by sharp slate hillsides under a deep blue sky as far as the eye can see.

Carthusian monks established the prior of Scala Dei, or Stairway to God, in the 12th Century, hence the name of the region. The monks, possibly coming from wine regions of France, were the first to bring the grapevine to this land. Terrasses or hillside platforms have been maintained–or abandoned–there by farmers for centuries and, in some parts, seem to extend over all available hillside surface. Almond, hazelnut, and olive trees, as well as the grapevine, have been grown on these serpentine corridors for millennia. Today Priorat is one of only two DOC designations in Spain. DOC is the Spanish acronym for ‘Qualified Denomination of Origin’, which is the highest distinction a wine region can get in Spain. The other DOC is Rioja.

The land of Priorat is thought by many to be an ideal wine-growing place for strong, dark, robust wines of great aging potential. The key, experts claim, lies in the fact that the land there is very poor and mostly comprised of slate. The hillsides are very steep and there is very little rainfall. All of these conditions make it a difficult place for agriculture in general, but the grapevine thrives there and produces wines of much character.

For most of the 20th Century, Priorat was a depressed and almost abandoned region, but in the 1990’s the place and it’s wines gained a lot of international attention due to the work of winemakers who saw its potential and invested in modern wineries there. To be fair, I should mention that this is a controversial subject here. Priorat produces some of the most expensive wines of Spain. Enologists and winery owners claim they are making wines that express the qualities of the region, wines of terroir. Old timers of the area and other critics claim that the new wines of Priorat are a commodity industrially produced as luxury goods for an inflated market and that they do not represent the wines traditionally produced in Priorat. Politics aside, Priorat is truly a place of immense beauty where wine culture permeates everything.

Years of compulsive wine drinking and pairing have led us to meet winemakers in different places. A triad of such unlucky wine producers, Peter Fischer, Laurent Combier and Jean Michel Guerin, share a small winery, Trio Infernal, in the tiny medieval village of Torroja del Priorat, which is an hour’s drive from our new home in Tarragona. A year ago, while visiting Peter Fischer’s estate in Provence, France, we told him we were interested in learning more about how wine was produced. He immediately suggested we experience it firsthand at Trio. We timed our move so we could be in Tarragona by the time of verema, or grape harvest. What better antidote to the fluorescent-lit, stressed-out, office life of New York City than to spend a season picking ripe fruit, under the warm sun of Catalonia, surrounded by mountains and trees? What if the office was the vineyard?

In New York we allowed ourselves the occasional luxury of a bottle of Trio Infernal 1/3 and even less frequently a bottle of 2/3. Now we could be part of the ’09 vintage ourselves! So for two weeks in September we showed up three times a week at the winery to help with whatever we were asked to do.

We picked grapes, weighed them, put them through the de-stemmer and into the fermentation vats. We helped temperature-control the vats, raked them, measured sugar and acidity levels in the must, moved oak barrels around, pumped wine from a to b, and even helped refill aging wine barrels in the cellar. Cristian Frances, the winery’s operation’s manager was friendly and patient. He would explain what to do next. Then put us to do it just as if we had always done it.

Winemaking can be tough, intense labor, specially during the weeks of harvest. Fruit must be picked within a narrow margin of time or it will overripe becoming useless for quality dry red wine. Picked fruit must be taken to the winery within a couple of hours, otherwise the heat can dehydrate it or its own weight can tear the grains where infections or fermentation can begin prematurely. In the same day the fruit must be de-stemmed and placed in fermentation vats. A small winery may need to pick and process 100,000 pounds of fruit in a week or two. That’s about 10,000 pounds a day of clusters that must be picked by hand for quality wine.

Fermentation vats of several thousand liters need to be raked daily to push the floating fruit down to keep it hydrated to avoid acetic fermentation that can turn the wine into vinegar. Tanks must be tested daily for progress of fermentation. Everything must be cleaned thoroughly daily. It’s a lot of work, but we were hooked!

After two weeks in the winery we realized that we needed a deeper understanding of what we were doing. Talking to locals we learned about the Falset Enology School. A vocational program in Falset, the regional capital of Priorat, for adults who want to learn the trade of winemaking. A month ago, the first day of classes, we walked into the school to find out more about the program and walked out as new students! Perhaps they were flattered that two seasoned New Yorkers wanted to learn to make wine there, but, more likely, they placed bets on how long the two soft-skinned city dwellers would last. Whichever the case, they made it too easy to join. But that is the subject for a future post…