Usually known by its Catalan name Priorat (rather than the Spanish Priorato), this is a tiny, isolated wine region just inland from Tarragona in Catalonia, on the Mediterranean coast.
Barely heard of in the early 1990s, it emerged internationally late in that decade with a handful of exciting, highly sought-after wines, some of which upstaged even the most prestigious Riojas by costing four times as much.
Priorat boasts the top classification, DOCa (Denominación de Origen Calificada).
It is a 'new old' wine region: vines grew here for centuries before the Romans arrived to mine lead and silver, but the region was progressively abandoned in the 1800s, barely recovered after phylloxera, and by the 1970s its villages were populated mostly by the elderly — only to be reborn.
The name dates from 1163, when Alfonso II of Aragón founded a Carthusian monastery, Scala Dei ('God's stairway'), on the spot where a villager was said to have seen angels ascending a stairway to heaven; priorato is Spanish for priory.
The top wines are all red: massively structured, with considerable tannin that makes them ageworthy, thick and soft in texture, loaded with ripe blackberry, dense chocolate, lively licorice and mineral/rock flavours.
That concentration comes from painfully low-yielding old vines — sometimes more than a century old — protruding gnarled and contorted from the poor, stony soil called llicorella ('licorice') for its blackish slate colour.
The region's two native reds, garnacha and cariñena (grenache and carignan in France), are its main grapes.
