The destinations were Vinyes d’en Gabriel in Darmós (DO Montsant), followed by lunch and a visit to Costers del Priorat, in Bellmunt del Priorat (DO Priorat). The day was genuinely hot, and it was a pleasure to get out of the car and walk around a spectacular vineyard with 100 year-old Cariñena and Garnacha vines. The owner, Josep María, was brought up by his grandparents (his grandfather is going strong at 92) using traditional agricultural techniques as a matter of course. Pesticides and the like simply bypassed them, and Josep María has simply carried on in the same vein.

The vineyard is a marvel of biodiversity – grasses and wildflowers with  butterflies, lizards, ladybirds and the like buzzing and scampering about. Everything is done by hand, not just the grape-picking. The old vines give about a kilo of grapes. They used to sell to the larger wineries in the area, but increasingly felt that what they had was special and it behove them to make their own wine. It is a three-person operation who look after everything from the cherished vineyards to the newly-expanded (though still small) bodega.

They currently produce three: L’Heravi, L’Heravi Criança and L’Heravi Selecció, with a special old vine Cariñena wine in the pipeline that we were privileged to taste from the tank. The defining feature of the wines was freshness and elegance, with an accompanying violet sweetness. There was nothing overstated, yet they all had a genuine presence in glass and in the mouth. Enjoyably sophisticated wines at keen prices that say a lot about how organic doesn’t mean crude or earthy. Pieter has really come up with something in getting hold of Vinyes d’en Gabriel.

We broke for lunch with the winemaker and CEO of Costers del Priorat, Jose Mas Barberà, at Restaurant L’Economat de les Mines in Bellmunt. They had served 500 covers the previous weekend, but the patron resignedly said that everyone had gone to th ebeach on this first genuinely hot Saturday of the year. This was lucky for us as we had the table by the large window looking out from high up the hill slopes. Swallows dashed around at head height as I ate my snails followed by pig’s trotter, washed down with Costers del Priorat’s Pissarres and Clos Cypres. I confess I’d ordered my heartly local classic dishes with these steely yet opulent wines in mind, and they made spectacular pairings. With the wine world’s characteristic generosity, there was no wresting the bill away from Jose,  who then led us to Costers del Priorat’s vineyards.

They have all their vineyards next to each other on facing slopes up to and beyond a hilltop cememtery lined inevitably with cypress trees. Lying all around was the characteristic jagged slate of Priorat, but before we could walk into the vineyards a terrific storm came out of nowhere. Worst of all there was violent hail. Jose kept his cool, but this was not what anyone wanted on thoseincipient grapes. So we headed off to taste his wines. This was another really impressive taste of two of the wines we had enjoyed at lunch, plus the appropriately light and sunny Elios.

It was particularly good to taste these chocolate and liquorice, but with theat characteristic mineral quality of Priorat uperpinning this all the while, and admire the way the Jose had succeeded in maintaining a harmoniously serene wine with all these macho elements looking to get their word in.

There has been something of a backlash against Priorat recently, with critics seeing the Denominación de Origen as being rather too much in terms of price and full-on — or aggressive for some — flavours. Costers del Priorat shows that this need not to be true in either respect.

All in all, it was a delight, and left me thinking that Valencia winemakers, in their different ways, have plenty to do to keep up with their neighbours to the north, who also keep refining and developing.

At the Club de Enófilos meeting of 26 October, we were given an insight into the latest developments at the bodega.

Underground gallery with inbuilt tinajas, Celler del Roure

The winery and owner-winemaker Pablo Calatayud have continued to develop and mature, moving from cramped beginnings in a warehouse to the more spacious surroundings of an old bodega where wine had been made from at least the early sixteenth century, and probably a lot earlier, until the interruption of the Spanish Civil War. This new (old) bodega had another surprise, a series of underground galleries complete with 97 tinajas (earthenware jars) mentioned in a document dating from the early seventeenth century.

Spurred on by the keen enthusiasm of Pablo’s father, the bodega has begun to experiment with making wine in the clay tinajas. After all, it’s how it was done for hundred of years until oak casks swept all before them in the nineteenth century.

The experiment began in November 2009 with Celler del Roure’s first white wine. They bought some 40,000 kilos of Chardonnay and began to make wine in a handful of tinajas, using blocks of ice to maintain coolness during fermentation. It so happens that Pablo got married in 2010, and he was persuaded to include this white wine in the wedding celebrations after only four months in the vessels, and it was a hit.

There are only some 4,000 bottles of this wine , and in honour of its fledgling condition it has been named “Cullerot” (tadpole in Valencian). It is a light gold wine, clean and appley, straightforward in style yet full and, of course, with a refreshing absence of oak.

We tasted Les Alcusses 2007 and Maduresa 2006, both fine wines, though the cedar, spice and power of the grander Maduresa rather overshadowed its junior partner when drunk side by side. As I said earlier, the bodega is always tinkering. This 2007 is the first vintage of Les Alcusses to include no Tempranillo in its blend.  From 2009 the red wines will include some tinaja-made wine in the blend. There’s plenty of scope, as half of the earthenware vessels take 2,400 litres and the other half 900 litres.

Les Alcusses is named after Bastida de les Alcusses, the historic Iberian settlement near Celler del Roure where archaeologists have found grape seeds and wine sediment in vessels from around 2,400 years ago. Talk about recovering tradition.

The event was held at the 8th floor restaurant of the El Corte Inglés on Av. Francia, with its terrace overlooking the Ciutat de les Arts i de les Ciències.  There was a worrying array of men in suits at the head table, but their speeches were short, impassioned (in the case of the heads of Valencia’s 3 Denominaciones de Origen: Alicante, Utiel-Requena and Valencia), and some were very funny – the guy from the Academia de Gastronomía de la Comunidad Valenciana. It was good to see Joan’s 30 years of devotion to the cause of Valencian wine, both as wine writer and winemaker, being celebrated. The West Indian intellectual C.L.R. James famously asked, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”, and so it is with Joan that his writing goes beyond wine to span life and literature, wisdom and folly.

Joan Martín Book Launch Invitation

After the talks, the assembled company was invited out onto the terrace to enjoy some of the wines mentioned in the book. I wasn’t able to do the rounds, as I had been called by Bodega Primitivo Quiles (the Comunitat’s oldest winery) to say that they weren’t able to make it and could I lend a hand and look after their stand. I was delighted to do this, as I love their classically traditional wines and I have a lot of kindnesses to repay them.

After wrestling with the pull-up banner I saw that in addition to the 3 wines they had said they’d provide – their sweet Moscatel “Extra Extra”, the moderni-style Monastrell-Merlot “Roble”, their eternal Monastrell “Raspay” Reserva – the delivery company had mistakenly left 6 bottles of their historic Fondillón Gran Reserva Solera 1948. I was a bit nervous about opening this liquid treasure, but the public is no fool, and they made a beeline for these bottles. Some had never tried the region’s unique wine, and having heard Joan refer to it as the embodiment and pinnacle of the region’s ancient wine tradition, now was their chance.

We have several Russian friends visiting, who have a discerning sweet tooth, and the dark, golden, luscious “Extra Extra” hit their collective spot.

One woman offered to marry me, mistakenly thinking I was Primitivo Quiles in person and could get her a lifetime’s supply of the Raspay, I had to confess that I was an impostor but that she could get hold of the wine, for under 7 euros a bottle, at Bodegas Santander‘s two outlets in Valencia.

I didn’t even have to carry the remaining bottles, as Sergei used to work in a  circus throwing hefty Russian acrobats and Russo-Californian sun-worshipper Greg Orduyan, when not creating amazing computer animation, is to be found doing press-ups on the beach, and they insisted on carrying everything. I held the banner ahead of them, though.

A great event, and I was sorry not to reacquant myself with the wines of the other bodegas, listed below (apologies to any I’ve missed out):

Dominio de la Vega

Finca San Blas

Heretat de Cesilia

Vicente Gandia

La Casa de las Vides

Chozas Carrascal

Hoya del Castillo

Coviñas

Vegalfaro

Bocopa

Hispano-Suizas

Bodegas Hispano-Suizas gets its name from the fact that the three partners are two Spaniards, Pablo Ossorio and Rafael Navarro, and a Swiss, Marc Grin. It is also fair to say that the evocation of the luxury car marque sits well with their grand project to make sophisticated, cosmopolitan wines. They are not unabashed at taking on the French at their own game.

They offer two Cavas, the biscuity, Champagne-style (Chardonnay and Pinot Noir) Tantum Ergo 2007 (I have a feeling that the 2006 was 100% Chardonnay, but these things move on at speed), while the Tantum Ergo rosado is Pinot Noir through and through. It is very much a salmon-coloured rosé Champagne rather than the bright pink Cavas you tend to see. Nevertheless, it does combine Mediterranean effervescence with French elegance, being bigger and brasher than its paler sister.

We moved on to Rafael Navarro’s pride and joy, Impromptu, the highest-rated Sauvignon Blanc in Spain in the 2010 Guía Peñín with 93 points. This is a rich, dense, golden, unctuous white wine. To my mind it again blended an almost New World oomph (nose, colour, presence) with French style in terms of lingering flavour and balance.

The two reds are the Bassus Pinot Noir 2007 and the Bassus Premium 2007 (Bobal, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz, and a small quantity of an unnamed fifth grape – Petit Verdot possibly?). The Pinot Noir is again a proper example of the grape, with its notably lighter colour than with most red wines from around here, but with that distinctive murky, velvet Pinot allure given a touch of Mediterranean vigour.

The Bassus Premium continues that balance of complexity with a certain approachable rigour. All in all, the wines are a tribute to the skillsof the three founders — Rafael in the vineyard, Pablo as a winemaker and Marc as overall packager and presenter of the project. Their Open Days straddling the anniversary of Spain’s Constitution and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception may not have been intended to convey practical effectiveness and progress blended with spiritual harmony and purity, but the dates seem well chosen.

There was talk of Ferrari visiting later in December, so it is good to see Hispano-Suizas keeping the luxury car connection and bringing Utiel-Requena wine to the top tables of Spain and Europe. I wonder if the Ferrari executives will christen the understatedly elegant private guest rooms that are being made ready on the second floor of what was the old house. I envy whoever does get to sleep here in the bosom of the vineyard with the bottles and casks whispering sweet nothings below.

However, it has given rise to a double project – to ascertain which wineries are open over the whole weekend, and more generally to put visiting time details on this site. At a guess, I’d say few are welcoming visitors on Sunday, but those that are should be patted on the back. Not that I begrudge anyone the kind of lazy Sunday I ended up having, watching Spanish and British football on TV and walking dogs in between.