Priorat: the Reinvention of a Region

In 1992 the last cooperage of the Priorat closed. After a lifetime among adzes and carpenter’s braces, Francesc Guiamet, the cooper of Gratallops, finally retired. And he did so in the firm belief that all was lost, that in the Priorat there was no other alternative but to gather up one’s belongings and flee. Practically everyone agreed with him. The fact that he had retired passed by almost unnoticed.

Let us make a short leap forward in time to the year 2002. While browsing through The New York Times a journalist comes across an article on Spanish wine. New Yorkers’ number-one newspaper extols the virtues of some of the wines from the Priorat. The most surprising aspect of all, though, is that a box in the article announces the fact that two of the comarca’s winemakers actually form a loving couple. Truly astonishing: a piece of local gossip published in the of the press of a great metropolis, at the centre of the world on the other side of the Atlantic.

A mere ten years had passed between one news item and the other. In just over a decade, the Priorat and its people had emerged from an existence immersed in a spirit of secular defeat to become news in the society columns of the New York Press. Wine that was only too often sold off cheap in carafes had given way to a wine solemnly uncorked in the best restaurants of New York, Paris and London. What had happened in the meantime? Had things changed so much? Had a new Priorat been born?

There are those who boldly speak of an economic miracle. And they may not be entireIy wrong. At the beginning of the 1990s a total of only ten private wineries (if we overlook the cooperatives) belonged to the Denominació d’Origen Priorat yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century the number had risen to fifty-odd. And included in this number are genuine winemaking empires such as Osborne, Pinord, Codorniu, Torres, Freixenet and Castell de Peralada, singer-songwriters famous over half the world like LluIs Llach and Joan Manuel Serrat, French wineries with actor Gerard Dépardieu as their flagship, a few former Spanish government ministers and an almost endless list of romantics and/or dealers in the liquid gold.

 

 

Social Renaissance

But as much as or more than in the sphere of economics, what is happening in the Priorat is a social renaissance, a kind of catharsis — a slow one, needless to say — that is transforming entire communities of militant sceptics into people who now have a degree of hope for the future and, more important still, for the present. Thanks to its wines, the Priorat now believes in something. There are young people who, for the first time in one hundred years, are returning to the country in response to a peasant-farming vocation. There are schools that, for the first time in one hundred years, have a growing intake of pupils. There are painters who have exchanged their brushes for the hoe. Sparkling new wineries are opening in villages where nothing had opened since who knows when. Rural tourism that follows the wine route is gradually beginning to make its presence felt. Hotel accommodation and restaurants are making their debut in bars and cafés, talk is once again heard of the price of Garnatxo and Carinyena. And most important of all: the Prioratins are recovering belief in themselves after a century of economic recession that began with the fateful outbreak of the phylloxera plague.

So you see, the most prestigious of wines comes not from Beverly Hills but from the Priorat. The nine municipalities that comprise the Denominació dOn gem Qualificada (D.O.Q.) Priorat have a total population of just over two thousand.

For the fact is that in the Priorat, despite the renaissance I mentioned above, everyday life continues at its characteristically slow pace. The last of the town criers, Juanfto, cornet in hand, still announces from the main square in El Lloar that soon somebody will come to read the electricity meters. In La Vilella Alta, the grocery store does enough business by opening only two days a week. Most of the town and village halls open sporadically, a few hours per week. The tortuous streets continue to be practically impassable and began to be paved only a few years ago. Street vendors are indispensable practically everywhere. The fishmonger announces his presence by sounding the horn of his van.

And the austere landscape has remained almost untouched, without a single smoke-belching factory, and most of the fields were abandoned to their fate until history decided to change its course.

Two Priorats stand at the threshold of the twenty-first century, although I could speak of many more, such is the diversity of the Mediterranean. The Priorat that is undergoing rebirth and looks towards the future as a point of reference for quality wines and the Priorat that heroically weathered the phylloxera storm, galloping depopulation and the seven plagues of Egypt. And the two Priorats are inseparable from each other, they need each other in order not to lose the impulse of their own private leap forward. The fact that one of the great world wine revolutions albeit an incipient one - of the late twentieth century took place on forbiddingly poor soil is by no means a chance occurrence. Moreover, this circumstance endows it with human merit and social significance it would otherwise have lacked had the revolution occurred, for example, in sun-drenched California with its celluloid and spangles. The revolution was possible only in a land that had to be reinvented.

The Past

Neither the rebirth nor anything else that the Priorat has become today can be understood unless we retrace our steps back to the phylloxera plague. Phyl!oxera vaxtratis, an insect that feeds on the sap of vine roots, hit Porrera in 1893. In the space of only a few years, before the century had time to reach its close, not a single vine was left in the Priorat. An insignificant-looking though devastating grub put paid in no time at all to a wine that already by that time had acquired international prestige. Indeed, it was precisely at that fateful moment that its prestige had reached its zenith, as the seigniorial façades from the second half of the nineteenth century in Porrera or on the main street of Poboleda proudly proclaim.

In all the towns and villages of the Priorat there are buildings that at the end of the nineteenth century witnessed how time ground to a halt. Poboleda has a church of cathedral-like proportions that invites us to journey back to a time of greater splendour, even absolute splendour. If you have the opportunity to visit or Cal Amoràs in Porrera, you will soon see that the Priorat was or, to put this in another way, that in the Priorat, like everywhere were rich landowners who were suddenly plunged into ruin, bringing else down with them. Cal Comte, in Torroja, provides us with the prefect metaphor: sumptuous murals from the period, with their bright blue lows, pierced by the blackened chimney shaft of a wood-burning stove.

In 1893, there were 17,000 hectares of vineyards in the Priorat. Practically not one single vine was saved and, worst of all, the Priorat proved incapable of recovering from the disaster. The vineyards that had provided the people with their livelihood became the bearers of death and desolation. Emigration was a relentless phenomenon that lasted an entire century. While other wine growing areas in Europe managed to overcome the crisis, no resurgence took place in the Priorat, "It was then that the exodus from the country to the city began. Towns and villages that had once been cheerful and prosperous became depressed and neglected to the point that in some more houses than people remained", we learn from an article published in the Catalan journal Esplai in 1934

The grub was not content just to suck the sap from the vine roots. The press of the I 920s spoke of fatalism, of psychological and moral crises, of collective apathy and impotence. The periodical Montsant described the situation thus in 1909: Today, except for the occasional oasis planted with vines, all we see is a great carpet of bindweeds... Nothing remains of the land we call the Priorat the skeleton and the name". Resignation everywhere and lasting, long-lasting.

Rebirth

The slow though progressive decline lasted a long time, too long. The Priorat was still suffering from anaemia in the I 980s. Of the comarca’s 17,000 hectares of vineyards in the nineteenth century only 800 remained in 1990, when the resurgence was just beginning to germinate. Everyone seemed to ignore the Priorat. Everyone except a handful of wine enthusiasts who, in the 1980s, began to purchase a few terraces and, in a relatively short time, had won the acknowledgement of international critics. This marked the incipient Priorat boom. These enthusiasts have been called by many names (the magnificent four, the pioneers, the Robinson Crusoes of the new Priorat) but their real names are René Barbier, CarIes Pastrana, josep Llu Alvaro Palacios, and Daphne Glorian.

Since then, since they marketed their first wines in 1982, nothing has been the same. We have to admit this. The specialised press has been lavish with its praise. Every year The Wine Advocate and Robert Parker, the great American wine guru of the end of last century, place one Priorat or another among the best in the world. Auctions at Christie’s — on Park Avenue, the most fashionable international thoroughfare — from Alvaro Palacios’s L’Ermita alongside other crown jewels of world oenology. Francis Ford Coppola loading several crates of Priorat onto his private jet at Barcelona airport. Ministers and ex-ministers of all political colours declaring their passion for Priorat red wines. Magazine front covers. Rocketing prices. Exports to half the world. The market at its feet. Reverential praise from critics and sommeliers. A veritable cornucopia had come to a comarca where at that time the gross per capita income stood at over twenty points below the Catalan average.

Let nobody imagine, however, that the Priorat wine revolution started from nothing, that everything was still to be done as if a potential wine grower had decided to plant a vine on one of New Zealand’s vast plains. Far from it. What had to be done in the Priorat was reinvent, go back to the beginning, rethink, refound and build again. In this respect, highly clarifying if not clairvoyant opinions had been previously expressed. In the I 940s the journalist Ramon Aliberch, in his book entitled Monumentos y mora villas de Cataluña, had things like the following to say: ‘. ..the wine of the Priorat is not marketed with sufficient cunning, we need someone who really values a diamond like Priorat wine". Another essential quote, by now almost a classic, dates from I 979 and was written by the visionary Jaume Siurana (a true wine connoisseur and founder of the Institut Català de Ia Vinya i el Vi de Catalunya) in his book Els vms de Catalunya. He said the following: "It is in the wines of the Priorat that we have the rough diamond that duly cut, polished and dressed may provide us with the most brilliant precious stone of all full-bodied reds".

What nobody could have predicted, however, in the late seventies of jogging and John Travolta, is that even Jaume Siurana had fallen short of the mark: the diamond, suitably cut, polished and dressed, as he says, would become not only one of Spain’s most excellent wines but a point of international reference. Nobody had yet intuited that twenty years later the Priorat would lead the wine revolution of Catalonia and convey its courage to other Catalan designations of origin. But we are not speaking only of Catalan wines: the Priorat has become a model to be emulated when it comes to making vins d’autor. There are those who contend that the Priorat’s was the second greatest Spanish wine revolution after the reinvention of the Ribera del Duero.

And thus, late in 2000, the Priorat became the second most important D.O.Q. after La Rioja, confirming through its regulations that the revolution was much more than just a vinicultural one. For example, D.O.Q. stipulates that 100% of the bottled produce must be made in the place that is, in the nine municipalities. It is strictly forbidden to gather grapes Priorat and transform them into wine 50 or 500 kilometres away. All profits must be reinvested in this long-suffering land, that is the law. The wineries built, stone by stone, in these municipalities. And thanks to this and to market demands, the Priorat now bottles its entire produce.

It would be unjust to attribute this revolution to the new generation growers, however. The great wines of the Priorat would not exist were the old vineyards clinging to the llicorella slopes from which the raw material emerges, the sparse grapes that a number of persevering farmers have continued to cultivate come rain come shine. And they have done so on gradients so steep that neither tractors nor any other kind of agricultural machine possibly cope with them. They are poor, bare slopes that, in some cases must be harvested by people harnessed like mountain climbers, otherwise they would roll like pebbles down into the plain. The Priorat is a land of mules and donkeys and which some winegrowers, faithful to tradition, continue to have as indispensable partners as they work their plots. And all this to squeeze the soil dry and obtain just over a kilo of grapes per vine, that is, when nature is at its most bountiful. Like someone who sieves tons of mud from the bottom of a river to obtain a gram of gold.

I have heard a relation of mine tell time after time how one day he was involved in a heated argument with a winegrower from the Penedès, Catalonia's vinicultural region par excellence, the land of the celebrated cava, who refused to believe that a Priorat vine yields only about a kilo of grapes. In all fairness to the man, however, it is estimated that the rich and not so remote Penedès yields up to I 0 kilos. At that time, little would he have imagined that both major and small producers from the would eventually move to the Priorat in the pursuit of less industrialised harvests and wines.

There are Priorati farmers, true to tradition with a capital "T", who have had to wait until retirement age, even their eighties, to see with their own eyes how the old Garnatxa and Carinyena vines for which nobody would have given a cent became profitable overnight, as if by magic. Valued, respected and even what one might describe as part of mankind’s heritage. At the height of the febre d’or ("gold rush") and in exceptional cases, the price of a kilo of grapes has risen by almost ten times in the space of a few years (from 0.60 to 6 euros). That the winegrowers have not thrown in the towel is another of the miracles of this land, where the production of good wine is not only a highly self-sacrificing but also a very expensive task. There are estates whose market value has tripled and the total acreage of vineyards has practically doubled since the mid- I 990s.

For some, therefore, success has come in their seventies. It is never too late, one is never too old, although now it is necessary to follow the instructions of oenologists of the wines of the new era to the letter, oenologists for the most part young and trained either at the oenology school in Falset or at the nearby Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona. At some time or another, either as teachers, students or both, today’s oenologists have attended these institutions eventually to re-perform the Priorat symphony allegro ma non troppo. At harvest time, it is far from unusual to find students from all over the world serving their apprenticeship at the Priorat wineries.

Alongside the newcomers, the traditional wineries have made great efforts to adapt. Whereas formerly they sold their produce straight from the cask, they now market it in bottles. Only a few years ago, they sold wine from the basements of their own homes; now there are those who export it to distant, very distant, lands. A revealing example is the case of Gratallops, a village of just over 200 inhabitants. For twenty years there was only one family winery in the village. Now there are fourteen more.

In some instances, the traditional winegrowers have joined major companies. The vinicultural Priorat, therefore, is no longer composed of those responsible for the resurgence. Talk is heard of different waves of wine. And the protagonists of these successive waves include experiences that over and above their vinicultural and oenological interest, reveal that in the trivialities of everyday life, in general outlooks, the Priorat is also changing.

If depopulation was one of the scourges of Priorati towns and villages throughout the twentieth century, there are those who now, thanks to the new wines, are returning to the houses of their forebears after their parents or grandparents packed their suitcases to move to Barcelona. Although some have not come back to stay, they enthusiastically engage in refurbishing the family home in Priorat that now enjoys not only prestige but also a certain glamour. Today, saying that you come from the Priorat impresses people. And although it incredible, something has been gained here too. Years ago, everybody in Catalonia knew that the Priorat produced wines. Now everybody, even on the other side of the globe, knows that the Priorat produces exceptional wines.

But not everyone who makes wine in the Priorat have come from far away, as some people believe. There are those that have, certainly, but there who have started from scratch, embarked on the adventure of planting and replanting and, in passing, contribute to the resurgence of towns and villages in which they were born. In the Priorat, now that we are at the beginning of the twenty-first century, who have decided to take the risk. What has changed? Why didn’t they do it before? Because before there were no expectations, not even a future. And if there is no future, why take risks?

The fact is that although in the Priorat the great Catalan, Spanish and French powers in the world of wine have set up shop in the Priorat, the typical local winery is small and non-industrial. Even the leading firms seek a touch of distinction for their brand name in the Priorat, where they make some of their most esteemed, most elegant wines. The annual output of some of smaller wineries is only five thousand prized bottles. Everything seems to indicate - although only the future can confirm this — that current trends favour small winegrowers and low production, the wines of great personality fruit of the hillsides and terraces that in themselves are a gift from history, tradition, the landscape and nature. The perfect balance between revival and conservation, between modernity and tradition.

There are wine cellars where it seems impossible that such small space provides room for casks containing wine that critics and connoisseurs from a world have extolled. Such is the Priorat of recent years: every five minutes, in the most unlikely corners, a wine cellar is born for all to see.

Many have sought to emulate the models of Burgundy or Saint-Emilion in their endeavour to ensure that the Priorat becomes consolidated as world’s classical wine-growing regions. They forecast that the number of small producers may progressively increase over the coming decades in this area, although its landscape is more Sicilian than French. This is a hand of vineyards interspersed with fig trees that seem to have emerged from nowhere, with silvery olive trees as twisted as the paths that lead to them, with prodigious dry-stone walls and rural cottages of almost Carthusian sobriety.

Together with Gratallops, Porrera is one of the villages where the rebirth is most noticeable, The fact that one of Catalonia’s most internationally famous singer-songwriters, Lluis Llach, has settled here permanently is a key factor. And the fact that, furthermore, he has also entered the wine business has also contributed to the phenomenon. At harvest time in Porrera, there are growers who go to the village square with only two or three basketfuls of grape clusters. It is almost possible to count the grapes one by one. This is the morning or the afternoon harvest, there is no more, only what the day brings, the scarce raw material of a wine that, needless to say, is far from cheap and not everyone is able to appreciate.

Schools are becoming too small

Thanks to the new era in the Priorat, Porrera — with its 500-odd inhabitants— has acquired a vigour that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago, when every day a throng of people set off from the village to work elsewhere. Now the tables have partially turned: each morning fifty or so workers set off and another fifty or so arrive. Furthermore, there are now children in Porrera, I mean that there are now more little boys and girls than a few years ago. The number of pupils at the village school has jumped from twenty in the mid- I 990s to over forty at certain times. And in small villages this means new life. In the streets of Porrera children are seen and heard playing again and the school has had to be enlarged. Not so long ago this would have been unthinkable.

In the streets of La Villela Alta I also find children. Their names are Catriona, Isabel, Lucia and Etienne. They are the sons and daughters of English, French and Spanish parents who have fallen in love with the Priorat and have their weekend or holiday homes in streets impossible to ride up on a bicycle. This now happens in the Priorat: a bicycle might be a useless piece of junk for ten-year-olds, unless they are determined to win the Tour de France one day. Foreigners who come, fired by curiosity, to discover the land where wine is made end up being seduced by its other charms. And this is not surprising. The misfortunes of an entire century have immunised the Priorat from certain tokens of progress. To begin with, there are no traffic lights, not a single one. And this is not the fruit of nostalgia for the past or blind loyalty to tradition. There are no traffic lights because they have always been and continue to be unnecessary.

Paradoxically, though, the economic paralysis of a century has today become, to put it in economic terms, one of the great added values of the comarca and, at the same time, of its wines.

No great urban monstrosities have been built. There are practically no industries. There are no smoky factories. Many of the landscapes seem to have remained untouched since the beginning of time, even though new terraces are gradually encroaching on the terrain. The discovery that the exceptional Priorat wine is produced on equally or more exceptional land contributes to fostering its prestige. Wine has become a lure and the Priorat as begun to design not only its tourist but also its landscape and economic development models. Secular oblivion, isolation, what was formerly regarded as a major tragedy have now become an element of distinction, a luxury for the local inhabitants and visitors alike.

The lure of the wine

Every corner has its surprises and picturesque touches. The picturesque quality of the Priorat, however, is not made of papier mâché, it is authentic. The little grocery stores of today still preserve something of their counterparts of yesteryear, which sold a little of everything. In the cafés, where PVC has still to be discovered, there are those who still smoke caliquenyos. People still chat in the squares in the cool of summer evenings. The local who, with his head bowed, wishes you adéu-siau may have a collection of vi ranci older than the wheel or fire at home. There are corners that would be the envy of Provence, even though they have only half its flowers. If you are observant enough, you will see ploughed land on summits that not even Neil Armstrong would dare climb. There are those who still play skittles in the square. There are hermitages that have seen more ascetics than the Vatican. And the Montsant — a huge rocky massif that becomes tinged with blue and pink at sunset — majestically presides over the entire comarca.

It is becoming increasingly common for tourist agencies from the nearby coast to organise — or at least recommend —visits to the Priorat, the land of exclusive wines. Foreign tourists travel from Barcelona to the Priorat since they cannot imagine having been in Catalonia without having done so. Tourist initiatives organised locally reveal that the possibilities are endless, ranging from gastronomic holidays addressed to the American and Japanese markets to rural tourism in farmhouses that mirror those of Tuscany or Provence. In the space of only a few years, Gratallops has seen the growth of its restaurant business. The offer is ever more varied and guided by criteria of quality. Overall, though, there is still much to be done, wine has moved so quickly that it is hard to keep up.

Socially, therefore, wine has not only fostered the vinicultural sector; it has also become the driving force behind the new-found prosperity of towns and villages in which nobody knew what the development model should be, apart from the magic factory that regularly featured in their dreams. Now, by contrast, the twenty-first century has begun with the landscape establishing the guidelines and rules that must be followed when it comes to modernising cultivation of the land. It would be criminal to spoil in no time at all the natural landscape privileges, the historical heritage of wine, so laboriously conserved throughout lifetimes of penury and hardship. Moreover, social and political mobilisation backed by part of the vinicultural sector managed to halt a government plan to convert the comarca into a major wind-power producing centre. The Priorat alleged that the plan was incompatible with the project designed to foster the quality of the wine and the landscape that had been set in motion. The Priorat has begun to debate its development model while, in the meantime, the comarca’s main mountain range, the Serra del Montsant, has been declared a natural park. The debate has begun and time will tell.

Sometimes it seems that everything has begun from scratch, that every day a new business or other kind of initiative emerges. There are a thousand and one projects: more cellars, wine museums, information centres, all geared towards the wine culture. The Priorat is a land under construction or, if you prefer, under reconstruction. The ruins of the monastery that gave the Priorat its name, which are gradually being re-consolidated, constitute, as one would expect, one of the major tourist attractions. It is from here, the first Carthusian monastery to be built on the Peninsula, that cultivation of vineyards is fostered. Even the lead mines of Bellmunt, which were closed in the I 970s after centuries of activity, have been reopened and transformed into an underground museum. Going down into these galleries affords one the unique opportunity to contemplate the bowels of the earth that produces Priorat wine. An excellent way to discover how the mines were exploited that, during the worst years for the peasant farmers, contributed to mitigating the crisis, hunger and impotence.

When you are inside the old galleries of the mine, you are reminded once again that nothing in the Priorat has ever been easy. Nor will it be. Traditionally speaking, this has been a land of Carthusians and hermits who, in some cases, still live in hermitages accompanied only by God and a rosary. The Priorat has always been a land halfway between the quest for spirituality and the struggle for survival. While the ascetics prayed, bandits with their blunder-busses were the lords of the Montsant. The comarca has been directly involved in all the peninsular wars and now the Prioratins are fighting their own private war against pessimism.

In 1835 the Carthusians of Scala Dei were expelled from their monastery by the decree issued by minister Mendizábal. For the Prioratins of the time, this marked the beginning of a kind of gold rush. They were convinced that the monastery was full of mountains of jewels and treasures accumulated over centuries of delmes and first fruits. For years they turned over stone after stone, to no avail. The gold was never found; everything had been a daydream. This is no fairy tale. The gold rush of 1835 comes to my mind when people talk of winegrowers who have come to the Priorat convinced that they would make easy money, only to discover that making wine on such craggy inhospitable terrain is far from a cushy job. Either you love and understand the Priorat or the land will put paid to you and your business. This is something in which it has had long experience.