From Revolution to Evolution: The Garnatxas and Cariñenas of Priorat & Montsant

BY JOAQUÍN HIDALGO | NOVEMBER 7, 2024

René Barbier Jr. is driving us along a winding road toward the town of La Figuera in Montsant. He wants to take me somewhere where I can see the whole of Priorat from above. Barbier is an affable fellow who tends to pay more attention to what he has to say than he does to the road, but he knows this road well—he’s been coming up here for as long as he can remember. Lined on both sides by pine forest, the road is only wide enough for one car at a time. Limestone cliffs loom over us, and the higher we climb, the more I lose my grasp on space. The landscape is familiar to me, too. As someone raised in the mountains, the sense that the horizon is lurking around every bend is always thrilling. I think about that as we proceed, savoring the adrenaline of altitude and the eagerness to discover what awaits on the other side. What I see when we reach the peak takes my breath away: a sea where the waves are mountain ridges and formations eroded into different shapes, held back on one side by a white wall—the Sierra of Montsant—while higher peaks form the other borders. This spring, that sea is green, its soft surface scattered with vineyards, terraces and the rooftops of the nine towns of Priorat.

Barbier and I discuss the history of the region. His father, René Barbier Sr. (Clos Mogador), together with Álvaro Palacios (L’Ermita), Josep Lluis Pérez (Mas Martinet), Daphne Glorian (Clos i Terrasses) and Carlos Pastrana (Clos de l’Obac), was one of the winemakers who put Priorat back on the map in the 1990s after a lengthy period of neglect. Until that point, the region was one of the poorest in Catalunya following the phylloxera plague and the Civil War. The vineyards only survived on the slate slopes because a select few winegrowers, as resilient as they were poor, were determined to keep their history alive.

The village of Gratallops is surrounded by vineyards planted on black slate. The Monstant mountain range rises in the background.

The road bends sharply and a sign announces Ermita de Sant Pau - Mirador de la Batalla del Ebro (Sant Pau Hermitage - View of the Battle of Ebro). Barbier Jr. turns off the road and follows a dirt track into the forest. “Now you’re going to see L’Espectacle,” he tells me. I’ve rarely seen a vineyard with a more appropriate name—the terraces of L’Espectacle run down the dramatically steep hillside toward the northwest, home to old Garnatxa vines with tortuously twisted trunks. In spite of the lack of rain (this is a theme of the 2024 vintage, with fires breaking out in some of the vineyards near the end of the season), the vines stubbornly insist on budding, just like they do every year.

I’m beginning to get my bearings: both La Figuera and L’Espectacle are located in Montsant. A few minutes later, we’re back on the road and crossing the Siurana River into Priorat. The only noticeable change is the color of the hills. Where before, they were white with chalk, here, they’re gray and brown, and the vegetation is sparser.

Priorat is a tough, hardscrabble terroir where stone is the reigning theme—from being the chosen construction material for homes and terraces to hindering the planting of vines or almond groves. There are only 12 to 15 inches of Llicorella soil, strewn with chips of slate, above the extremely hard bedrock underneath. That rock is heavy slate, shattered by the heat and cold to form extremely tight channels. Vines take advantage of these channels to draw their sustenance, usually from spots where clay has settled and “the rainwater likes to hang out,” as Sara Pérez of Mas Martinet puts it. Pérez is another member of the generation that followed the revolutionaries of Priorat. A woman of character, she combines a sense of duty to keep moving Priorat forward with a more personal mission, which she began to set in motion at Mas Martinet in 2012. “I told myself, ‘When I get over my fears and shyness, I’ll change the style of my wines.’ In the end, I changed it while feeling both afraid and shy,” Pérez says, laughing. Her approach brings out a primary purity in her wines that, compared with the rich stylings of the past, makes them feel quite spare. 

Belmunt del Priorat was a lead mine until the early 20th century. Today, the new "costers," or terraces, are laser-drawn and carved into the rock. Pictured are the vineyards of Casa Gran del Siurana.

From Friars to New Generations

The industry in Priorat began with Carthusian monks around 1194. This sunny, mineral-rich region, famous for its lead and tungsten mines, has been largely unsuitable for crops other than vines, peaches and almonds, with the exception of a few seams of calcareous clay on its periphery. Now home to about 100 wineries and 2000 hectares of vineyards, the resilience of the land is evident in both the wines and the people who make them. 

After the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, Priorat fell under the shadow of the Franco dictatorship. Migration away from Priorat and to the cities was only to be expected, as the region was unable to sell its wines to anyone. By the end of the 1980s, this was a land ripe for rebirth, and that’s exactly what the Fantastic Five (as the pioneers of the renaissance are known) achieved. The 1990s saw a grand resurgence, giving rise to ripe, hefty wines with Bordeaux-style structures that put the region back on the map. The combination of the local terroir and the hot Mediterranean summer climate creates the ideal conditions for producing wines with 15-16% alcohol, deep concentration and large frames, which was precisely what consumers valued at the time. That style brought fame back to the region and helped it to flourish once again. Today, one kilogram of grapes from Priorat is worth three euros, where before, that fruit was essentially worthless.

It fell upon the second generation to refine this style, break with their forebears and set out on a substantially different path—Sara Pérez, René Barbier Jr. and Albert Costa, who runs Vall Llach, all tell this tale. Others, like Ester Nin of Nin Ortiz and Dominik Hubert at Terroir al Límit, took on the burden of defining an entirely new style for Priorat, drawing the ire of traditionalists as they crafted more ethereal interpretations.

Today, Priorat generally offers wines made in a more calibrated, refined and balanced style. These wines generally possess a distinctive quality, locally referred to as minerality: a talcum-powder-like texture that lingers on the finish of nearly every wine grown on the slate. This sensation shifts with the character of each variety. At one end, you have the light-footed wines, the Garnatxas colloquially known as “aerial,”although I prefer the term “ethereal.” On the other end, the Cariñenas, where some of that earlier stylistic substance remains. These are wines with precise acidity and textural suppleness. “Garnatxa is for parties, summer and exuberance,” says Jordi Jutglar, who runs the vineyards at Mas Doix. “Cariñena is the opposite: pure silk.” I couldn’t agree more. Where Garnatxa reflects an infusion of flowers and red fruit with some classical structure, Cariñena yields a more compact palate with delicious notes of pomegranate and a distinctly silky feel.