Alvaro Palacios Camins Del Priorat

Garnet red in colour. The bouquet shows aromas of liquorice, currants and blackberries. Supple and velvety on the palate, it offers a gorgeous ripe blueberry, fig, and blackcurrant fruit accented by notes of dark roasted coffee beans and dark chocolate. Fine tannins emerge on the back-palate. Long and nuances of spice, liquorice-tinged finish.

One of nine children born to the owners of Rioja’s respected Palacios Remondo, Álvaro studied enology in Bordeaux, while working under Jean-Pierre Moueix at Chateau Pétrus. He credits his tenure at Pétrus for much of his winemaking philosophy and for showing him the importance of great wines. Álvaro could have returned to the security of his family’s Domaine. But instead, he was drawn to remote and seductive Priorat, 60 miles from Barcelona, which had been one of Spain’s important pre-Phylloxera wine regions. Beginning in the 12th Century, Carthusian monks had painstakingly terraced and cultivated this rugged landscape, and Álvaro believed that their ancient wisdom could be tapped to yield wines with the stature of Pétrus and Grange. From the beginning, viticulture was fastidious, with organic farming standard and mules employed to work the steep, terraced sites. But Álvaro also came to trust in the monks’ wisdom, and in the varieties that they had selected over centuries as best adapted to the land. In particular, he recognized that regional Garnacha clones were the great heritage of this appellation. And, in time, he also came to cherish the small amounts of other varieties—including white grapes—that were interspersed among his vineyards.