This wine guide to the Catalonia wine country discovers a Mediterranean wine region that's now getting the international recognition it deserves. Passionate winemakers are integrating old and new vineyard methods to produce quality exclusive wines.

Wines from the Catalan wine country are experiencing a breakthrough, especially the powerful Priorat wines, which aromas are unlike any Mediterranean wine you've tasted. Other appellations like the champagne producing region of Peneds, or Montsant are following their footsteps.

Winemakers from the Catalonia wine country display a remarkable creativity and dynamism. If necessary, they climb cliff-like vineyards with a donkey, or handpick every single grape, but they always channel their passion for winemaking to every bottle of wine.

On Majorca, although real state pressure is huge, many mountain wineries refuse to bow to the easy tourism money. They found encouragement in the experience of Porrera, a Catalan winemaking village, and have become key players in the revaluation of wines of Majorca.

As Mrius Fuertes i Mateu, a Catalan enologist, says:

Wine, like cuisine, and everything that arises from the heart of nature [...] wants people with a religious calling.

The use of endangered traditional grape varieties in the new quality Majorcan wines is exciting. They also work in the recovery of the malvasia of Banyalbufar. For centuries, this Majorcan grape variety produced an appreciated dessert wine that everyone misses dearly.

My childhood is full of memories of my grandmother sitting with some friends, delicately holding a glass of muscat, malvasia, or ratafia, a sweet wine you make at home with herbs and green walnuts on the waning moon of the month of May. After being forgotten for years, Catalan quality dessert wines are beginning to get their due.

Wine country, terroir, holistic wine making

Twenty-four centuries ago Greeks from Asia Minor taught us how to domesticate wild grapevine plants and how to make wine. Since then, the wine world is united to Catalonia, its landscape and history, Mediterranean food and cuisine, economy, culture, and joie de vivre.

In his wine guide on how to drink and eat properly, unique at the time, the Catalan medieval writer Francesc Eiximenis already told us that "Drinking moderate amounts of wine gives joy to man."

The ancient tradition of Mediterranean wine became well established with Roman rule. Thanks to this stability, the Mediterranean and Catalan wine universe survived the Nineteenth-Century strike of the phylloxera, which devastated most European vineyards.

The idea of a wine terroir that now the French, and many a wine guide promote aggressively is nothing other than taking into account every human and natural element that plays a part in winemaking.

In the small Priorat town of Porrera, they have always known that winemaking is a philosophy, a holistic process that was absent from most wine guides until recently. The town's orography is so complicated that if they didn't have a philosophical concept of wine, they would probably be doing something else, anything else.

A quality bottle of wine is an integral part of a whole wine universe pervading numerous Mediterranean towns and wine countries, and embellishing their landscape with beautiful vineyards. You can't understand wine if you isolate it from its human and natural milieu.

The philosophy of wine is noticeable in the whole Western Mediterranean region. Wheat, oil and wine have nourished the Mediterranean peoples for many centuries. That essential triad gave birth to a specific Mediterranean culture and shaped a lifestyle unmistakably Mediterranean.

Green vineyards by the sea,
green at first light
soft green toward nightfall...
Always keep us company,
Green vineyards by the sea!

So sings a major Catalan poet, Josep M. de Sagarra, in the final stanza of a poem that masterfully evokes the beauty of the Catalan vineyards by the Mediterranean sea.