by Al Drinkle
The following was sent as an email by Al to the Metro Mates this past February.
Good day to you mates in Calgary,
I've been in Priorat for just over 24 hours, and considering the brisk winestyles that I customarily advocate, I'm still not over the irony of going out of my way to be in this wild outpost of Northeastern Spain. But I have to admit something — I love Priorat! The place, that is... but also the wines that I encountered today!
Priorat is a daunting and extraordinary place. Yes, I've seen the steepest of the steep in the Mosel, but one can still effortlessly cycle through the most dramatic wine regions of Germany — the vineyards are suicidal, to be sure, but the villages and thoroughfares are typically on the flatlands along a river, and organized according to the meandering whims of the various waterways. Priorat, on the other hand, is the very definition of rugged, and its routine inaccessibility and random placement of vineyards (whatever has been heroically perpetuated or replanted following phylloxera) makes it seem all the more untamed.
Proud, proper mountains loom imposingly to the west of the region, but Priorat itself is a haphazard series of significant protrusions of the black slate and quartz-based “soil” known as llicorella (countered by dips and valleys of llicorella... and yes, I'm using the Catalan spelling to be fancy). Vineyards face every direction, but not ubiquitously as they are interspersed with scrubland, cacti, and charming, quiet villages that defiantly balance themselves on precipices, seemingly ignorant of the modern world.
I'm staying in a town called Falset that's at the south end of the region, and I had my first meeting this morning in Torroja which is only 16 km away. The first 10 minutes of serpentine roads got me to Gratallops (home to Clos Mogador, Clos Figueres, Alvario Palacios, etc.), and they weren't any more intimidating than what I've seen in Crete or even parts of Canada. However, I was somewhat suspicious about the fact that I had almost covered all of the scheduled kilometers of the trip, but in terms of arrival time, I had only completed half of my journey. Needless to say, the road from Gratallops to Torroja was ABSOLUTE INSANITY!!!
"Hairpin" corners don't even begin to describe it as I wove the car along wasted, precipitous mountainsides, repeatedly gaining and losing altitude as 25 km/h felt like the speed of sound. The paucity of guardrails was also disturbing, as if the government could only afford 10% of what was required and therefore installed these small gestures of safety completely randomly, leaving hapless drivers with endless opportunities to project their cars off of cliffs. Miraculously, I arrived alive in a tiny village that was built with the directive of wine production (cellar doors on all of the ancient buildings), but clearly hasn't been wholeheartedly applied to it for many generations.
My meeting was at Terroir Al Límit. Yes, my name is part of their name, and Eva is familiar with these wines from her career in Australia (Eva, please share the anecdote about your dad with the mates! It's a good summary of TaL). A German named Dominik Huber worked a harvest in Priorat in the late '90s and fell in love with the place. (Many people do! A conspicuous number of Priorat's revolutionaries are outsiders). He returned to establish his own estate and just over 20 years later, he's making some of the least expected wines that one could uncover here — and yet to me they very much embody the savage typicity of this wild Mediterranean region. Today Terroir Al Limít farms 22 hectares or so, but much of this is for their project in Montsant which was only established a few years ago.
I tasted in a small loft apartment that commanded a spectacular view of the Montsant mountains, right above the small press house. Dominik and his partner had just moved out a month ago(!!!), and I stared at the mountains as I tasted with a young lady named Lucía... poor thing! I asked one billion questions, but she was eminently cordial and hugely informative.
On paper, Terroir Al Limít is very "Metrovino". They exclusively work with indigenous grapes, they farm biodynamically and their wines begin fermentation spontaneously with whole berries and some whole clusters. Hand harvesting is a prerequisite of the terrain. Every cuvée undergoes élevage entirely in concrete and bottle (they have recently jettisoned all oak from the winery) and they don't use sulphur until bottling, at which point they are judiciously dedicated to its glorious utility. Many of their sites are from around their home-village of Torroja, which has traditionally been Carignan country, so they've got a couple single-site Priorat bottlings that are 100% high-altitude Carignan. (How tight are your pants, RH?). Lastly, their wines almost never exceed the Priorat DOQ minimum alcohol level of 13.5% (what a stupid fucking rule!), and their Montsants usually sit around 12%. As another "lastly", and as of recently, they've switched from environment-befouling heavy bottles to lightweight glass.
That's on paper, but in the glass, Terroir Al Límit is also very "Metrovino". The wines are suspiciously light in colour (the Montsants hilariously so), tantalizingly extroverted in aroma, and with structural frameworks built on buoyant natural acidity and discrete, fresh tannins. The Carignan-heavy cuvées brood a bit more, but they resonate with otherworldly spices, and the Grenache-dominant wines are aromatically intoxicating and texturally seductive. They remind me of some impossible hybrid of the gorgeous “off”-vintages of Rayas but with less alcohol, the very best of Ochota but with more precision and focus, and Dutraive’s high-tone Fleuries but with a Mediterranean flair. I can’t wait to get these to Alberta so that we can drink them every single day! (Yep, I just wrote that about a Priorat producer).
I find myself very hungry at this point, so I'm signing off to go in search of some hearty nibbles and frisky sips. Keep raging, mates! Buzzed love from Priorat,
-Al
Terroir Sense Fronteres
2021 Brisat de Montsant Blanco $44
2021 Negre de Montsant $44
2021 Marcenca de Montsant $126
Terroir Al Límit
2021 Històric Priorat $45
2019 Terra de Cuques Priorat $68
2021 Arbossar Priorat $126
