29/07/2022
Today we inaugurate a new content space in Enjoy Wine, the "Winemaker of the month", a project in which, through talks with producers, professionals and friends of Enjoy, we will get to know some of the most exciting wine projects of the moment.
We will start with one of the most influential winemakers in Catalonia in recent years, a pioneer of Priorat who, together with his wife, the winemaker Mariona Jarque, with their work were able to put on the map a hitherto forgotten region, we are talking about Carles Pastrana, owner and founder of Costes del Siurana, known worldwide for its wine Clos de l'Obac.
Good afternoon Carles, to put ourselves in context, it is important to remember that although wine has been produced in Priorat for hundreds of years, it was not until the 1980s that quality wine began to be made.
How did you decide to undertake a project in the Priorat with the little prestige the region had at that time? How did you experience those early years?
That's a good story: At the end of the seventies (78-79?), I had returned from the USA (a new, open, advanced society full of opportunities) trying again to fit in with what Tarragona was and represented in the seventies. In those days, and even before my departure to the USA, an old neighborhood friend and childhood playmate, René Barbier, with whom we had been neighbors as children, and with whom we had lost track of each other many years ago, had reappeared in Tarragona. Well, from that chance meeting, both I and, later, my wife Mariona, established with him and his wife Isabelle a sincere and close friendship.
In those days, René was working for a small Riojan winery introducing its wines to the European market. I was a restless and young person with the (logical) desire to forge an attractive future for my family and myself, and as a journalist I worked in radio in Tarragona and in the written press in Barcelona.
During these first years of reunion, from time to time, the two families - with our respective children still very young - spent weekends at a farm that René and Isabelle had bought in Gratallops. We were very young, with many illusions and we often talked about what we would like for our future. Thus we were weaving what would become our wine and life project and we decided to go ahead together. That's how it all began, and that's how, with René, Mariona and I, we began to know something about great wines and how the project of "The New Priorat" was born, which would take us years to carry out and during which different people from different European countries joined us.
If there is something that stands out in your wines, it is their incredible aging potential, what do you consider to be the keys for a wine to age well and what makes Clos de l'Obac wines so long-lived?
In order to make a great wine for aging, you have to start with a great fruit and put all five senses into the whole process, from the vineyard to the bottling, through the winemaking and aging. In Priorat you are faced with a very special slate terroir, a very complicated orography and a difficult climate. All this leads to low yields, which in this DO have always produced wines of great concentration, very structured and with a unique personality and, as a consequence, with great ageing potential. From there, the secret was to make impeccable elaborations through an obsessive neatness during the processes that go from the vineyard to the bottling -passing through the tillage, the elaboration and the aging- avoiding any external agent to alter or damage the final product, that is, the wine in the bottle and its potential longevity.
Speaking of aging, what do you think is the best time to enjoy your wines and which are for you the great vintages of Costes del Siurana?
This is an exciting question for us. Our winery is unique in the world in the sense that its wines (Clos de l'Obac, Dolç de l'Obac, Miserere and Kyrie) are based on four different "fixed coupages" that are repeated, vintage after vintage, in that they are always made from the same vineyards, the same grape varieties and the same percentages of each variety, which means that each vintage is subtly different because it reflects the climatic variations of the vintage. Thus, it can happen that the wine from a younger vintage starts to be extraordinary before that of an older one, since it is the climate of each vintage that will define the "momentum" for uncorking the bottle, understood as the harmony between acidity, sugars, and balance of the whole in the mouth.
What do you think of the new classifications applied in Priorat, which allow you to distinguish your wines according to the village or plot they come from?
Well, here I refer to the famous phrase of the utilitarian philosophy made famous by Deng Xiaoping: "Black or white, the important thing is that the cat catches mice". In other words, whatever you do, the important thing is that the wine is spectacular.
What do you think is the future for the Priorat DO?
If wine regions are known and valued for the quality of their wines, the climate and terroir of Priorat have already shown what it can offer in terms of great wines of the world; now everything depends on the effort, honesty and professionalism of the producers of this DO. But in general I see a great future for it.
We didn't want to end the interview without talking about your son Guillem, we know that he has been working and training for years to take the reins of the winery. How do you see the coming years of Costers del Siurana with Guillem at the helm?
Well, in fact, right now, together with his mother, Mariona Jarque, who is one of the four winemakers of the winery, he is managing the winery in an excellent way. In a broad sense, he is the one who is in charge of Clos de l'Obac, bringing the modernization of the conceptus, that is: design, construction, image and symbol, which once made the four wines of Clos de l'Obac and Priorat a benchmark of quality in the international market.
