2005 Melis Priorat

Melis Cellars is in Spain’s prestigious Priorat appellation. It is owned by Victor Gallegos, Javier Lopez and Russ Weis, all three of whom have extensive experience in winemaking and winery management in California. They are the team behind Sea Smoke Cellars on California’s Central Coast and they expanded into Spain in the late 1990s when they bought an abandoned Priorat wine estate. Their debut vintage was 2004. The Melis Priorats are blends of Grenache, Carignan, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. Robert M. Parker Jr. has complimented Melis wine as “a splendid example of what can be achieved in Priorat.”

Priorat in southern Catalonia is one of Spain’s newer regions for quality wines. With only about 2,500 vineyard acres, it is not one of Spain’s larger appellations, and its rocky mountains and hillsides make for challenging vineyard management. But grapes have been grown here in the rich, volcanic soil since at least the Middle Ages, when Carthusian monks planted vineyards. Bulk wines were the main focus here until the late 1970s, when pioneering Spanish winemakers Alvaro Palacios and René Barbier replanted vineyards and vastly improved winemaking in the region. Clos Mogador, Clos Erasmus and Finca Dofi were some of the now much-admired wineries started in the later decades of the 20th century. By the 1990s many innovative, quality-focused wineries were started in Priorat, making it one of the hottest winemaking regions in Spain. Priorat was made a DO in 1954 but upgraded to the prestigious Demoninación de Origen Calificada, or DOCa, in 2000. (In Catalan, the regional language, the appellation abbreviation is DOQ.) Full-flavored, full-bodied wines with relatively high alcohol content are characteristic of Priorat, with Garnacha (Grenache) and Carinena (Carignan) being the traditional grapes.