After three years of extreme drought that brought water restrictions and threatened vine growing in Priorat, Scala Dei’s 50th anniversary took place on a grey, rainy day —a welcome change when plants are dying of thirst.
Drought and significant drops in production are likely to define the 2020s in a region known for its low yields. Just days before the anniversary celebration, we spoke with Ricard Rofes, director, winemaker and the man who has revitalised Scala Dei's wines by reconnecting them with their roots. Rofes described how, when preparing the soil for new plantings at Masdeu, their highest and most renowned site, there was no trace of moisture beyond 80cm deep; only dust. Old vines in Priorat have suffered greatly in the last two years because the water could not reach the depth where their roots grow. “The extreme conditions we are experiencing are unlike anything that the región's oldest wine growers have ever seen,” Rofes pointed out.
fter 50 years of bottled wine and several centuries of viticulture, there are many stories to tell. By bringing them all together, Scala Dei becomes a guiding thread to understand Priorat from the period predating the Clos revolution in the late 1980s, when René Barbier, José Luis Pérez, Álvaro Palacios, Daphne Glorian, Carlos Pastrana and others laid the foundations of a new style that put the region on the map of fine wines worldwide.
Documentary evidence shows that some of the vineyards currently farmed by Cellers Scala Dei correspond to sites and plots of land tended by the monks of the Carthusian monastery of Escaladei in the 17th century. The monks held considerable control over this region —named Priorat after the prior's domains— virtually from their arrival in the 12th century until the disentailment of Mendizábal in the 1830s, when their assets were seized and plundered.
In the second half of the 19th century, five families from Barcelona –unfamiliar with the wine business- acquired part of the monks' former properties and joined forces to set up Unión de Escala Dei. One of the milestones of this period is the 1878 wine, which was awarded a silver medal at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889. However, phylloxera curtailed the winery's ambitions. Some families continued to work on their own until the business was re-established in the 1970s under the name of Cellers de Scala Dei. This new chapter began with Cartoixa 1974, the first wine bottled under the Priorat seal.
This wine also served as the starting point for the vertical tasting held to celebrate the winery’s 50th anniversary. Led by Ricard Rofes, the tasting took us on a journey through five decades of winemaking. The event featured testimonies from some past winemakers, Cellers Scala Dei's current president, Joan Gassiot, who spoke on behalf of the founding families, and Sergi Fuster, CEO of Raventós Codorníu, which has managed winemaking and sales since 2000, when it took a 25% stake in the winery.
The tasting focused exclusively on Scala Dei Cartoixa. Originally conceived as a red Garnacha blend with around 20% Cariñena, Cartoixa has remained a staple of the winery’s offering since its foundation. Over time, a premium range was developed featuring two single vineyard Garnachas, Masdeu and Sant Antoni, as well as a Cariñena called Heretge. Cartoixa retails for around €35 in Spain. Production in recent vintages has not exceeded 10,000 bottles.
Cartoixa 1974 and 1975 are the oldest vintages of Scala Dei's modern era. I had tasted both separately before, but never side by side. Ricard Rofes cautioned that the 1974 vintage had more variability, so attendees could experience different impressions depending on the condition of each bottle.
Our 1974 had subtle herbal aromas and spices that evolved into notes of leather, dust and damp earth. The acidity was much higher than what is typical for Priorat today. The bar was raised significantly with the 1975, one of the best wines of the tasting -Rofes noted it was a superior vintage, and the wine showed it: lively, with well-defined spiciness, herbal notes, and a fine, silky, polished palate that ended with an earthy finish, reflecting the character of the terroir.
Both vintages reflected the grape varieties grown at the time in the Escaldei area, with Garnacha (80%) dominating over Cariñena (20%). 115,000 bottles were filled in the 1974 vintage, and 88,000 in 1975. Production declined gradually due to commercial constraints, but it is clear that the winery was confident in the quality of its wines and took pride in showcasing the distinctive landscape of Priorat as well as its local grape varieties.
The late Jaume Mussons oversaw the winemaking from 1974 to 1989. He and his father ran a wine warehouse in Barcelona and registered the Scala Dei Cartoixa brand. His son, Jaume Jr., who is also a winemaker, spoke of his father's love for Priorat and the way he settled in the region, taking part in the foundation of Cellers Scala Dei with the García-Faria, Peyra and Gassiot families, and handing over the brand name to the company. It seems that his greatest challenge at the time was to control the fermentation temperature. At the time, destemming was not common practice and fermentation took place in concrete vats, although Mussons gradually introduced stainless steel tanks. He came up with the idea of numbering the bottles, perhaps influenced by his Bordeaux training.
According to Rofes, the trend in this decade leaned towards less structured wines. While these bottles may not have been the most exciting, we appreciated the winery’s honesty in presenting the reality of the wines from that period.
We tried a 1987 Gran Reserva as stated on the bottle neck, with the lactic notes slightly drowning the herbal aromas, stewed plums, raisined fruit character and slightly more extraction than in the 1970s. Robert Parker reviewed this wine in the June 1995 issue of The Wine Advocate. He gave it 90 points and it was his favourite wine from the estate that year. Parker praised the spicy, powerful, concentrated style underpinned by Garnacha and described it as “Spain's answer to Châteauneuf du Pape”. At the time, the wine was imported to the US by Europvin. The recommended drinking window was from 1995 to 2005.
The second bottle from the 1980s was a 1989. It wasn't a Cartoixa, but a Scala Dei Crianza, intended for short-term consumption and, in fact, it showed considerable evolution.
During the decade of Priorat's international rise, the region produced modern reds by blending local and international grapes, primarily Cabernet Sauvignon, some Merlot and, later, Syrah. Notably, the first vintage of Álvaro Palacios' L'Ermita was 1993.
From the 1990s we tasted Cartoixa Gran Reserva 1991 and 1993. Traditional ageing categories were more prevalent in wineries established before the emergence of the Clos. The new wave of ambitious reds that flourished in the 1990s championed terroir and deliberately bypassed this classification.
Although dominated by oak on the nose, the Cartoixa 1991 revealed a different structure and tannins, even if there wasn’t any Cabernet in the blend -the first plantings of this grape variety were made between 1996 and 1998. Tasted almost 25 years later, I found it lacking a fuller mid-palate to wrap the tannins. Unfortunately, the 1993 vintage was oxidised, resembling the style of a rancio wine.
Josep Arnal oversaw winemaking from 1995 to 1995, followed by Marta Conde, who was in charge from 1996 to 1999.
The first wine of this decade was a 2005 that faithfully represented the style of powerful Priorats, with generous fruit in a ripe, liqueur-like character over an earthy, mineral quality. The wine was full-bodied, firm, with enough acidity, well-integrated oak and good overall balance. It proved the ageing potential of a well-executed approach to the modern, somewhat extractive style that shaped a whole period in the area.
Mari Carmen de Francisco, who started looking after the wines in 2000 when Raventós Codorníu took a stake in Cellers Scala Dei, said that she had learnt how power can often overshadow elegance. She also admitted that she had not fully appreciated the distinctive value of high-elevation Garnacha. Ricard Rofes, who took over in the 2007 vintage, would go on to become a champion of this variety, despite his initial reservations due to previous experiences in Montsant and in the lower, southernmost tip of Priorat.
His first 2007 vintage, still with international varieties in the blend, shows less extraction and begins to reveal floral and herbal nuances. The texture marks a change from previous wines. This is an expressive, well-made red with far more aromatic depth.
In the late 2000s, the region began to move towards more subtle wines, often linked to specific terroirs. A good example is the way Terroir al Limit revamped its range in the 2006 vintage with a village wine, two vi de coster presented as premier crus and two single-vineyard wines as grand crus.
At Cellers Scala Dei, 2007 marked a turning point towards the recovery of the model established in the 1970s, as it became clear that the wines of that decade had aged much better than those of the 1980s. Another major breakthrough was the discovery that the grapes and stems of high-elevation Garnacha grown on clay soils rather than slate, ripened at the same time. As a result, whole-cluster fermentation was introduced to compensate for the tannins of the international grape varieties.
Despite this new approach, the winery gave in to the prevailing trend in the area and changed the packaging of Cartoixa, abandoning the historical labels and switching from the Burgundy-shaped bottle to Bordeaux. This phase starts with the arrival of Raventós Codorníu in 2000 and lasts until 2010.
2011 is the first vintage in which Cartoixa has returned to the traditional blend of 80% Garnacha and 20% Cariñena and the Burgundy-shaped bottle, a style that calls for a restrained use of oak. Looking back is the key to building Scala Dei's current profile, which, as Rofes pointed out, fits in well with the international trend towards refined, fluid wines.
All these aspects come together in an expressive, evocative 2016, reminiscent of the Mediterranean landscape, with part of the wine aged exclusively in concrete tanks. With a generous bouquet of aromatic herbs, this is a supple yet deep red wine with remarkable persistence. According to Ricard Rofes, 2016 is “a pre-drought vintage, dry and warm, but not scorching”. I saw a link with 1975 in terms of structure and the weight of Mediterranean herbs.
To learn more about the rediscovery of Garnacha at Scala Dei and how this grape variety has shaped the range of top single-vineyard wines, read this article published in SWL in 2015.
The tasting ended with a youthful, fruit-driven 2020, that showed blue fruit and floral aromas but retained the herbal background and was a little more ethereal on the palate. 2020 was a vintage with plenty of rain in the spring, but the dry summer resulted in one of the earliest harvests in the region. Anyone who anticipated the threat of climate change at that time could not have foreseen the nightmare of three consecutive years of drought that the future had in store for the area. Hopefully, the rain of recent weeks will bring a much-needed change.
