Greatness rises from spain’s new wine soul: 2022 annual report

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THE KING OF GARNACHA-BASED REDS

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And if you’re looking for wines that bring pure Mediterranean energy to the glass, Dominik Huber and Tatjana Peceric, who run the Priorat winery Terroir Al Limit and its Montsant offshoot, Terroir Sense Fronteres, deliver. This is all due to their winemaking, Huber said. “We don’t do extraction. Rather, it’s an infusion winemaking. It means we don’t punch down or pump over,” he said. “We age the wine in cement and today we do not use oak anymore.”

Senior Editor Zekun Shuai during a Zoom interview with Dominik Huber of Terroir Al Limit

He also pointed out that he wants less “ego” involved in the duo’s wines, going for the unadorned, authentic version of whatever comes out of the vineyard. But this also means there’s little room to hide if there is a mistake, according to Peceric. Her fascinating personal project’s Coreografia Montsant 2021 and luminously light-ruby rosé, the Coreografia Priorat Clarete 2021, are among our top and most drinkable discoveries this year.

For Huber and Tatjana, their personal tastes and the quest for gastronomic harmony in line with Spain’s changing culinary scene drive their style toward more digestible wines that appeal to the younger wine-drinking crowd.

“But big change only happens with a generational change,” he said, even though there are lots of wines that dwell upon the safe, old recipe with creamy oak and lots of extraction of ultra-ripe fruit. At best, they can deliver safe but also predictable wines with outstanding quality, and there is still a big market for that.

But the wines made by the talented, new-generation winemakers like Huber and Tatjana and the others we spoke to are anything but banal, with less of the winemaker’s fingerprints on the final product. Their one commonality is making the right decisions when it comes to letting the terroir speak for itself in the wines.

And when Spanish terroir speaks, it is powerful, whether showing off Atlantic freshness, Mediterranean energy or anything in between. The result – premium wines with a focus on drinkability – would make anyone want to jump on the bandwagon.

– Zekun Shuai, Senior Editor