The wine
fairs are a meeting again with friends and winemakers, and also a good pretext
to visit lovely places from the Catalan geography.
The shorter
days make us realise that winter is arriving and is a signal that the wine fair
season is upon us.
One of the
last wine fairs is Tasta Porrera (Taste Porrera),from which are wines made
in this little village from Priorat: with around 500 habitants and 16 cellars.
Porrera is the lowest village in the Priorat and also it’s the village with the
highest vineyards because it’s surrounded by mountain ranges at 600 m above the sea level, and 700 m and more of
800 m.
When you go
to Porrera and leave the main route, you realise that all that you can see in
the landscape are vineyards, hazelnut and almond trees which grow in steep
slopes. You realise that Porrera is basically an agricultural village. And you
can imagine the harvest as a risky activity! In spite of it, the beauty of the
area charms everyone, and when after a narrow route full of curves you arrive
at Porrera and walk in the narrow streets you feel that you would like to live
there!
In the main
square of the village on the Saturday of the second weekend of November there
is the Tasta Porrera (Taste Porrera), and enogastronomic fair
because also you can taste specialties of the local cuisine. And this year it was
the 10th anniversary of the death of a great Catalan poet, Miquel
Martí i Pol, so as this was a special occasion the wines of each cellar were
combined with a poem of his.
This fair has
again confirmed to me that wines from Priorat (and in this particular case the
wines from Porrera) have a special characteristic that make it different of the
wines from other Appelation of Origin, because of their particular soil: the slate (llicorella in Catalan).
Priorat is
a well-known area for red wines, most of their production is red wine (90%),
but the white wines are a little treasure. If you have the opportunity, you
should taste a white wine from Priorat, they are incredibly delicious.
In Tasta
Porrera we had the opportunity to taste two white wines: Lo coster blanc 2012, with a very limited production (less than 500
bottles!) and Mas d’en Compte blanc 2009,
one of my favourites and fleshier than the first one. It was a great
pleasure taste these wines!
