Terra Dominicata

Terra Dominicata

The Priorat is one of only two wine regions in Spain to hold the country's highest classification, DOQ, the other being Rioja. It sits inland from the Mediterranean city of Tarragona, about two hours southwest of Barcelona, a landscape of vertiginous terraced vineyards cut into steep black slate and quartz hillsides in the shadow of the Serra de Montsant. The slate soil, called llicorella, is what makes the wines: it forces vine roots to drive deep into the rock in search of water and minerals, producing fruit of extraordinary concentration, and the wines that result are full-bodied, intensely mineral, and capable of ageing for decades. The most famous bottle in the region, Álvaro Palacios's L'Ermita, sells for over a thousand dollars. The landscape that produces it looks like nothing else in Spain, all precipitous slopes and ancient dry-stone terraces and the ruins of a 12th-century Carthusian monastery at the village of Scala Dei, from which the entire region takes its name. The Priorat was all but abandoned for most of the 20th century. Phylloxera wiped out the vineyards in the late 19th century, the population emigrated, and the region fell quiet. It was only in the late 1980s that a small group of pioneering winemakers, including René Barbier and Álvaro Palacios, arrived and saw what the old vines and the llicorella could produce. The revival they triggered is one of the great stories of modern wine. Today the region has over a hundred wineries, and some of the most sought-after bottles in Spain come from these almost impossibly steep hillsides. Terra Dominicata sits 1.5 kilometres from the ruins of the Carthusian monastery that gave the region its name, in the natural park of Montsant, on a farm that in the 12th century belonged to those same monks who first planted vines here. It is a 26-room adults-only hotel and working winery in a single estate, run by the Vives family, producing its own DOQ Priorat wines from vines grown on the property. The rooms have beamed ceilings, hardwood floors, and original stone walls, with rain showers, freestanding bathtubs in the suites, and the kind of quiet that registers physically within an hour of arrival. The pool is set among the vines and olive trees with the Montsant mountain range as the backdrop. The spa includes a wine barrel sauna and a hot tub tucked into the olive groves for private use by the hour. The restaurant, Alma Mater, cooks with local and estate-grown produce and pairs everything with wines from the cellar below. Guided tours of the bodega run twice daily. The pace is calm and slow, a long lunch on the terrace that becomes an afternoon, a glass of estate wine at the pool that becomes two. Nobody dresses up. Nobody is in a hurry. The guests tend to be food and wine people, couples who have chosen experience over spectacle, and the kind of traveller who considers two hours from Barcelona a feature rather than a drawback. From the pool, on a clear day, you can see the Pyrenees. The people who come here know wine, or are willing to learn. They are not here for the beach. They are here for the specific silence of a monastery landscape, the specific pleasure of drinking the wine from the vines they can see from their terrace, and the specific satisfaction of being two hours from Barcelona in somewhere that feels entirely removed from it. The short version: A 26-room adults-only hotel and working winery on a 12th-century monastic estate in the Priorat, 1.5 kilometres from the ruins of the monastery that gave the wine region its name. Rooms with stone walls and beamed ceilings, a pool in the vines, a wine barrel spa, a restaurant built around estate produce, and your own DOQ Priorat wines made from the vineyards outside your window. Two hours from Barcelona. One of only two regions in Spain with the country's highest wine classification. Go in autumn during harvest.