In 1989, five young winemakers drove into the Priorat valley with almost nothing — no money, no equipment, no market, and no certainty that the crumbling terraces they were about to plant would ever produce anything worth drinking. Thirty-five years later, Priorat is one of only two Spanish regions to hold the DOCa classification, and its wines sell for hundreds of euros a bottle.
The story of modern Priorat is one of the most remarkable in the history of wine — a tale of collective vision, physical hardship, and the kind of stubborn belief in a place that most rational people would have abandoned. The region had been in decline since the phylloxera epidemic of the late nineteenth century devastated its vineyards. By the 1980s, the population of the comarca had collapsed, the terraces were crumbling back into the hillside, and the few wines still being made were rough, oxidised, and sold in bulk for almost nothing.
What the pioneers saw — and what the market had entirely missed — was the llicorella. This ancient slate and quartz soil, unique to the Priorat and a handful of neighbouring valleys, forces vine roots to penetrate deep into the fractured rock in search of water. The result is a vine under permanent stress, producing tiny yields of intensely concentrated fruit. Combined with the region's extreme topography — terraces so steep that all work must be done by hand — and a Mediterranean climate moderated by altitude, the conditions for extraordinary wine had been there all along. They just needed someone willing to find them.
"We didn't know if it would work. We just knew that the land was extraordinary and that nobody else was paying attention. That was enough."
— René Barbier, Clos Mogador
Before the Pioneers: A Region in Ruins
Priorat's winemaking history stretches back to the twelfth century, when Carthusian monks established the Scala Dei monastery in the valley and began cultivating the steep terraces that still define the landscape. For centuries the region produced powerful, dark wines that were prized across Catalonia and exported to France as blending material. At its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, Priorat had over five thousand hectares under vine and a thriving wine economy.
Phylloxera ended it. The louse arrived in the 1890s and destroyed the vineyards with the same efficiency it showed everywhere else in Europe. Unlike Burgundy or Bordeaux, Priorat never fully recovered. The replanting that followed was partial and half-hearted; the young left for Barcelona and the cities; the terraces fell into disrepair. By 1979, the region had fewer than six hundred hectares of vines, most of them tended by elderly farmers who sold their grapes to the local cooperative for almost nothing. The Priorat that the pioneers found in 1989 was, in every practical sense, a ruin.
1989: Five Arrive in Gratallops
René Barbier had been visiting the Priorat for years, convinced that the llicorella terraces were capable of producing world-class wine. In 1989 he persuaded four friends to join him in a collective venture: Álvaro Palacios, a young winemaker from the Rioja family of the same name who had trained in Pomerol; Daphne Glorian, a Swiss-born wine lover who had fallen for the region on a visit; Carles Pastrana, a Catalan winemaker with deep roots in the area; and Josep Lluís Pérez, a biologist and winemaker from Tarragona who would go on to become one of the region's most important figures.
The five pooled their resources, rented cellars in the village of Gratallops, and made their first vintage together — a single wine called Clos Mogador, produced from old Garnacha and Cariñena vines that had somehow survived the decades of neglect. The wine was extraordinary: dense, mineral, complex, and unlike anything else being produced in Spain at the time. Within a few years, each of the five had established their own estate — Clos Mogador (Barbier), Clos Erasmus (Glorian), Clos de l'Obac (Pastrana), Mas Martinet (Pérez), and the wines that would make Álvaro Palacios internationally famous: Finca Dofí and, eventually, L'Ermita.
The Llicorella: A Soil Unlike Any Other
The key to understanding Priorat is the llicorella — a dark, friable slate and quartz schist that covers the steep hillsides of the comarca and gives the wines their defining character. Unlike the fertile soils of the plains, llicorella retains almost no water and provides minimal nutrients. Vines planted in it are forced to send their roots metres deep into the fractured rock, tapping into the mineral reserves of the subsoil and producing grapes of extraordinary concentration and complexity.
The effect on the wines is unmistakable. Priorat's best bottles have a mineral quality — a kind of stony, graphite-edged depth — that is impossible to replicate on other soils. The Garnacha and Cariñena that dominate the old-vine plantings produce wines of great power but also surprising freshness, with a saline, almost iodine-like quality that keeps them from being merely heavy. The best examples age magnificently, developing extraordinary complexity over a decade or more in bottle.
DOCa, Vi de Vila, and the Region Today
The success of the pioneers attracted attention and investment throughout the 1990s. In 2000, Priorat was elevated to DOCa status — Denominació d'Origen Qualificada — making it only the second Spanish region after Rioja to achieve the classification. New producers arrived, prices rose, and the region's international reputation was established. The challenge that followed was one familiar to any newly celebrated wine region: how to maintain quality and identity as success brought pressure to expand and commercialise.
The answer, for the most thoughtful producers, has been the Vi de Vila classification — a village-level designation introduced in 2009 that identifies wines made from grapes grown within a single village's boundaries. The seven Vi de Vila villages — Gratallops, El Lloar, La Morera de Montsant, Poboleda, Porrera, Scala Dei, and Torroja del Priorat — each produce wines of distinct character, and the classification has given producers a framework for communicating terroir differences that the broader DOCa designation cannot capture. It is, in essence, Priorat's answer to Burgundy's village appellations: a recognition that place matters at a granular level, and that the llicorella of Gratallops is not the same as the llicorella of Porrera.
From the Cellar Book
Featured Estate
The pioneer whose wines put Priorat on the international map — and whose L'Ermita, sourced from a single ancient Garnacha parcel above Gratallops, remains one of Spain's most sought-after bottles.
Priorat Essentials
Key Grapes
Garnacha · Cariñena
Climate
Mediterranean Continental
Country
Spain
Related Itinerary
Priorat in Three Days: Gratallops, Porrera, and the Llicorella Terraces
Cellar visits in Gratallops, a walk through the Vi de Vila terraces above Porrera, lunch at a village restaurant in Torroja, and an evening tasting of the five pioneer estates — the essential Priorat long weekend.