Les Terrasses 2020

Alongside the wonderful top-class Ermita and Finca Dofí wines, Álvaro Palacios also offers Les Terrasses – a simpler wine but brimming with personality and elegance too. Les Terrasses is a 'regional wine' from Priorat, made with grapes from 80 different vineyards spread out around eight villages. Grapes are destemmed and lightly pressed and the must left to ferment in concrete and oak vats with native yeast. The resulting wine matures in oak barrels and vats for between eleven and thirteen months depending on the vintage. Like all Álvaro Palacios creations, it is an elegant wine but it also has an interesting earthy feeling with a discrete rustic hint of Carignan which gives it a special character.

It does not have the vanilla-like sweet taste that an excessive prominence of barrels gives to certain wines from other wineries. Its time spent in new wood depends on the characteristics of each vintage but it is never allowed to overshadow the expressiveness of the fruit. A clear and honest wine, with subtle and juicy tannins, it is a faithful expression of the top-quality healthy grapes used to produce it. It offers a velvety feel even though it makes no attempt to hide its tough origins, reminding the drinker of the dry and dusty tracks winding up among the mythical broken slate Priorat vineyards.

Les Terrasses has an intense Picota cherry colour in the bottle, and its clean, intense and complex aromas are both fruity and floral (lilacs and violets). A liqueurish hint of ripe cherries and plums blends with spicy and lactic tones to create a wonderfully balanced wine. Fresh in the mouth, with aromas of scrubland and pencil lead, and a discrete toasted touch, it is a splendid wine best drunk after being decanted carefully.