Saturday, 29 March 2014

Tasta Porrera I: More than a Priorat, a privilege (slogan Marco Abella cellar)



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!