Proprietor/Winemaker
Alvaro Palacios Wines
Priorat, Spain

Everyone knows L’Ermita. It is the vineyard and the wine that put the Priorat on the map, because from its first bottling people paid $300 a bottle, and today they pay up to $1000. Many ask if the wine is worth it. Indeed, there are many special vineyards in the Priorat. But this one came to belong to Alvaro Palacios. With statements like “The monastic origin of wine is a guarantee of quality, and something else — a spiritual side that captures your heart and makes you fall in love with this wine, with everything here,” Alvaro has given the Priorat an irresistible voice, and with his wine, he has given it the critical respect that only a high price can achieve.

Alvaro comes from a prestigious winemaking heritage in the Rioja: Palacios Remondo. He studied winemaking in Bordeaux and developed his winemaking philosophy while working at Château Pétrus. René Barbier invited Alvaro to participate in the now mythic Gratallops Project in 1989. As the story goes, René and friends each bought vineyards; they tended them together and made wine in the same cellar until they began making their own wines in 1990. Alvaro’s first wine in the Priorat was from Finca Dofí. In 1993 he bought L’Ermita, with its old Garnatxa vines, and the wine that resulted altered the course of history in the Priorat.

Alvaro and his onsite winemaker and longtime friend, Oriol Castells, worked side by side in the beginning, tending the vines. In the Spring they turned the soil by hand with picks, starting at the bottom and working their way to the top, only to look back and see it all green again! For them the mulas (mules), typically used on the steep slopes in the past, are a great “modern” advancement. Today Alvaro has a dedicated team that looks after the vines season to season, tilling with mules and pruning and harvesting every vine by hand, as he and Oriol did in the beginning.

A few years ago I stopped by the cellar and Alvaro happened to be there, tasting wines from the various parcels to make the blend for Les Terrasses. He invited me to join him and his family for lunch. There I sat in the tower of his winery, looking out to his beloved L’Ermita de la Mare de Déu de la Consolació while experiencing a 1994 L’Ermita, silently wishing someone would pinch me so I could be sure I was not in the middle of a dream. That afternoon was proof positive that wines made from the old vines of the Priorat are time in a bottle: history, humanity and earth.

The Priorat may have opened the world to Alvaro, but Alvaro also brought the world to the Priorat. They are a gift to each other, and for all the power Alvaro’s words hold, he has never forgotten where the wines begin, whether in the Rioja, in Bierzo, where he makes wine with his nephew Ricardo Perez, or in the Priorat. Wine begins with nature and the history of the land. This is why Alvaro has been named the 2015 Decanter magazine Man of the Year.