The Wandering Vine by Nina Caplan

Author:Nina Caplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

This was the capital city, and the fount from which flowed wine both good and mediocre in immense quantities. Today, the most famous wine in Catalonia comes from a slate hill, two curlicueing hours’ drive inland from Tarragona, beneath imposing crags cut out of a hot, milky sky. Priorat’s big, deep reds are a very long way from the kind of rotgut that Ovid expended on his mistress’s porter: it is Spain’s only DOQ, the country’s top designation of wine quality, apart from Rioja. Prices are high, unsurprising when you stand at the edge of a vineyard, as I did at Ferrer Bobet, with your toes curling over its lip, staring at the top of an employee’s head as she examines buds at the bottom of the same vineyard, ten metres down. So hard is winemaking here that one vine will yield a bottle or sometimes even half a bottle of wine; down the hill, in less rarefied vineyards, you get five bottles per vine.

There are theories about Roman winemaking here – Christopher Cannan of Clos Figueras has a Roman wall in one vineyard and has found a stone he believes was part of an early wine press – but very little solid information. Six centuries after Roman influence in Catalonia ended, a clutch of monks escaping heavy taxation – ‘they didn’t want to pay for the king’s wars any more,’ says Cannan – founded a monastery here and, presumably out of the usual desire for solace both spiritual and material, planted vines on land so steep that, even today, tending by hand or donkey is often the only option. Appropriately, they named their monastery Scala Dei, God’s Ladder. Certainly, this is a special place: there is nothing quite like Priorat, with its vineyards threaded in single-file zigzags up the steep hill made of a special, glittering schist, called licorella, that is apparently the reason for the unusual quality of the wines.

The modern-day faithful are the clutch of winemakers who turned up in the 1970s, long after phylloxera had devastated what was left of the industry, and founded five wineries, originally vinifying their grapes all together in one ramshackle barn. They believed that better wine could be made on these vertiginous slopes than the bulk swill that was all that remained to Catalonia after the louse’s depredations had led to the uprooting of vines and corresponding displacement of vine-growers. And they were right. Isabelle Barbier drives me round Clos Mogador, the most famous of those pioneering estates. She is a Frenchwoman from Nantes, which is a nice rest for my schoolgirl Spanish: ‘Nous voulons refaire la vie du terrain [we want to make the land live again],’ she tells me, talking of planting wheat as well as vines, just as they would have done long ago.

Isabelle’s husband René Barbier is, despite his name, Catalan, for the last few generations, anyway: the family arrived from southern France after phylloxera had ruined livelihoods there, the kind of migration in muddy boots that was presumably one of the ways the louse travelled south.

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