The monks of the twelfth-century charterhouse of Scala Dei first planted these terraces, and the priory gave the region its name. Phylloxera emptied them; emigration did the rest, and by the 1980s almost no one was left on the slopes. In 1989 René Barbier, Álvaro Palacios and a handful of friends arrived with five "clos" — and within a decade Palacios's L'Ermita ranked among the most expensive wines in the world.
The material was there all along: old Grenache and Carignan rooted metres deep in llicorella, the glinting decomposed slate that forces vines to mine for water and yields tiny crops of ferocious concentration. The wines are mineral, immense and licorice-dark, a resurrection that made Priorat one of only two regions holding Spain's highest classification.