2021 Terroir al Límit Priorat Arbossar

Another Vi de Coster, the equivalent of 1er Cru. Arbossar is a steep, 1.6-hectare vineyard of 100-plus-year-old Carignan planted on schist and granite. It’s close to the village of Torroja, where the Terroir al Límit cellars are based. Against conventional wisdom, Arbossar was planted on cooler, north-facing slopes. It was this unusual site, purchased in 2005, that informed much of Huber’s early experience with the terroirs of Priorat. As Luis Gutiérrez explains, it’s always a “fresher and more floral style” than the corresponding Dits del Terra (from the south-facing slopes). It’s picked earlier, too. The wines are made in a similar fashion: 100% whole-bunch vinification with wild yeasts and 16 months’ maturation, exclusively in concrete. Huber describes Arbossar as a wine with a French soul, a German head and a Spanish heart; we describe it as deeply impressive. With its striking perfume and refreshing spine wrapped in layers of raspberry and floral fruit, it is the most Burgundy-shaped Arbossar to date. This is finesse through and through.

In just twenty years Dominik Huber has created something unique in Priorat and, arguably, in Spain as a whole. While these Catalan hills south of Barcelona are no stranger to critically fêted wine, Huber’s transparent, pared-back examples are both striking and radical in the Priorat context. His is a style of Priorat that has seen critics and other wine people scrambling to offer plaudits and comparisons.

Through many years of trial and error, Huber has managed to evolve a style of Priorat that is all about mesmerising finesse, purity and freshness. With old-vine Carignan and Grenache as the conduit for the reds, Huber has now shown the wine world that Priorat wines do not have to be heavy, thick and oaky. And he has also shown that the whites of the region can be every bit as great as the reds. They are beautiful, textural and mineral whites that taste as if they’ve been tapped directly from Priorat’s rocky soils.

Dominik Huber’s wines have redefined what we all once thought was possible from the vineyards of Catalonia.

Huber’s vineyard selection has involved a search for high-altitude, old-vine plots that allow him to harvest ripe fruit with maximum freshness. He practices biodynamic viticulture and picks as early as possible (he would pick even earlier if the DOCa allowed it). Huber uses whole-bunch (there’s no de-stemmer at the winery) and carbonic fermentation to significant effect, favouring an infusion-over-extraction approach. The wines are raised in concrete only. All this lends Huber’s wines an almost Burgundian-like shape and structure, generating vibrancy and succulence, with the emphasis placed squarely on the glowing, stony, mineral essence of Priorat’s soils.

Terroir al Límit is a domaine in a constant state of progress, forever seeking to refine and improve their way of working. The arrival of head winemaker Tatjana Peceric to assist Dominik Huber, and the quality emanating from the Montsant project, Terroir Sense Fronteres, are two significant examples in point. In recent years, the range has been downscaled to allow more focus on what Rajat Parr has termed the domaine’s “maniacal farming practices”.