Gran Clos

In 1990 the Catalan government published a rather large book celebrating 1,000 years of viticulture in the region. Priorat did not even warrant a mention. Fast forward two decades and the rest of Catalunya would give their right arm to match the quality and price of the best Priorat wines.

Irishman John Hunt liked the wine at Gran Clos so much that he bought the winery. To be fair to him, Priorat is hard not to fall in love with. A tiny area that still has just a handful of wineries, Priorat is the wild Spain. Grallatops, the biggest village, houses just 200 permanent residents. This place makes Nuits St-George look like a metropolis. Windswept and ragged, visiting Priorat is like stepping back in time. It is hard to image that Barcelona is virtually on its doorstep.

Priorat's isolation is its greatest feature. A land that time forgot, with century-old vines, gnarled olive trees and a unique soil type called Llicorella, a cool dark-brown slate that sparkles with quartzite. It is this soil that gives the wines what Jancis Robinson describes as their "mineral essence". With an annual average of just 16in of rain, the vines are forced to dig deep into fissures in the rock but are rewarded with a source of pure mineral-rich water when they go deep enough. The old vines that do produce tiny quantities of some of Europe's most naturally concentrated wines. Unlike the garagistes of Bordeaux's right-bank, concentration and intensity is not a winemaking choice in Priorat but just what nature provides.

The wines at Gran Clos are made by Josep Angel Mestre, a local boy from Falset. Josep has a marked preference for the traditional side of Priorat, choosing to base his own wines on old vine Garnacha and Carinyena and only seasons with relative interlopers like Cabernet and Syrah. His wines have been winning acclaim and awards wherever they have been shown. The highlight coming in 2005 when Gran Clos came top of a blind tasting of top Priorats from the 1995 vintage in a 'ten years on' tasting. No mean feat considering the likes of Finca Dofi, Clos Mogador and Clos Erasmus were all in the line-up. It is also testament to how wonderfully these wines age. A recent Gran Clos vertical stretching back to that 1995 vintage showed how muscular, ripe and fresh these wines are even with more than a decade in the cellar.