Mas Martinet Assessoraments

Midway through the course of 1985, René Barbier and Carles Pastrana came to see me at the vocational school in Falset where I was teaching and offered me to participate in the project they were planning.
The aim of the project was to produce high-quality wine, expensive but sustainable in the area of El Priorat.
The argument René put forward in justification was the answer to his clear vision of:
- The potential for producing good wines in the region.
- The high production costs associated with vineyard installation and with the annual works carried out on the vineyard.
- The response of communication experts in the wine business.
In the presentation made by René on the project, one could easily see that he had been thinking about it long and hard. It was not an improvised thought that had just crossed his mind.
He knew that the orography of the area responded to mountain viticulture, that the slate soil was primary, not very deep, stony, and with little water retention, and on top of that, rainfall was poor between June and September. All these parameters make the soil of El Priorat not very fertile and consequently not very productive. Therefore, if production costs were going to be high, the wines would have to be expensive. But production costs would not make all the difference, it would be quality.
“Will the wines have enough quality to match the prices?” René categorically replied “Yes!”

The proposal implied a number of determinants that had to be accepted if I wanted to take part in the project:

1. I would be in charge of the viticultural and oenological technical issues.
2. I would have to buy a plot of land and grow vines.
3. I would have to participate in the building of a joint winery.
4. The production of all the vineyards, for the moment, would be elaborated jointly and only a wine would be made but each of us would have their own label so that the wine could be sold as if were own produced. This would be done until the production of each partner was sufficient to elaborate their own wine separately.
5. Price per bottle would be 1,500₧ (9€ at the current exchange rate, we were in 1985!) for all of us and therefore the quality of the wine would have to match the price.

René told us that the wines that were considered worth the attention of wine critics were expensive wines but, of course, they had to be of excellent quality otherwise they would have no stability on the market.

I took on the challenge although the idea sent a chill down my spine. At the same time I felt flattered by the proposal. I was willing to do my very best. I felt strongly attached to El Priorat through the students I taught at the oenology school. I was as worried as anybody else about the depopulation of the region basically because the youth would leave for the capital and try to earn a decent living.
I was immensely pleased to take part in the odyssey of recovering this rough region, which at the same time has a strong personality.

We have to travel back in time to the mid-eighties, when wine was just another element in gastronomy, more or less, like table wine currently, which has to be good but bought at an affordable price. It was just another food product. We had no tradition of producing or consuming the type of wine René was talking about.
In Spain, the only two well-known regions were La Rioja, for its wines and El Penedès, for its sparkling wines. There was a culture of table wines but we had no culture of quality wines. There were just a few people that knew about great wines and could afford their high prices.

The first time I went to commercialise our wine in 1991, I went to a specialised shop in Tarragona and when I told the owner the price, he said I was crazy. He said that Priorat wines sold in bulk cost 100Pts per litre and if bottled, a maximum of 400Pts per litre: “1,500Pts, you must be joking!”
We had to wait until 1992, when some sommelier courses were first taught and their provincial associations were founded. There were more and more wine tasting courses and wine culture was becoming fashionable. We have to be really thankful to those who promoted this specialty because, without them, our efforts to commercialise quality wines would have been fruitless. We would have failed in our own country, whereas abroad, where there already was a wine culture, we were positively welcome.

In the 80s there was a plethora of nonconformist ideas coming from all the wine-growing regions in the country. We had come from a decade when the demand for bulk wine had reduced. Spain, which back then was the country with the highest production of this type of wine, was hit by a sale crisis and wine surplus rose.

The cause was mainly the use of technology in northern European countries. In those countries sugar was added to increase the wine colour and as a result of this, they did not need to import so much wine from southern Europe.

The reaction to this was collective all over Spain. The so-called “improver” wine varieties such as Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet, etc, started to be planted and regrafted. All over the place new wineries were set up by people who did not belong to any winemaking family saga but to other professional fields and were not willing to let their homeland to lose economic power. That was an extraordinary moment! Together with some of the former students at the vocational school in Falset, we planted French grafted vines in the regions of Rueda, Ribera del Duero and some others. In those parts of Castile big plots of land, where beetroots had previously been grown, were now planted with vines.

That was the time when the well-known critic, Mr Robert Parker, wrote that he had found the “Spanish Petrus” in reference to Mr Alejandro Fernández’ Pesquera wine. That provided a morale boost for all those people who, like ourselves, had their hopes pinned on their own incipient projects. Mr Parker has been frequently criticised but I believe that the idea he wanted to express is that quality wines can be made wherever man likes (within limits, of course) and that great wines do not belong only to classic European wine-producing regions, as it was believed then.

We would, nevertheless, like to draw attention to the importance that these regions, like Bordeaux or Burgundy, have had in the development of quality wines all over the world. Back then, we paid constant visits to all the European wine-growing regions. The students in the vocational school, as it is mentioned in the previous article, with their way of acting and that moment in our lives also left their positive imprint on each of us.

In 1981 and after a long time working as a teacher of natural sciences and biology at Viaró School in Sant Cugat del Vallès, Montse and I decided to move to the rural area of El Priorat and work in a vocational school in Falset. I had the feeling a stage of my life was over. A stage where I had learnt how to teach and enjoyed myself very much doing this for the eight years I worked there. But I wanted to go back to my rural origins, I had the urge to experience and share the problems and the day-to-day country living, and, why not, participate in making the future of the young winemakers a bit better.

When we moved there, unlike most of the people that nowadays come to El Priorat from all over the world, we had no intention of working in the field of winemaking or viticulture. Montse, also a graduated biologist like myself, got a post as a science teacher and I was the responsible for the technical management of the school and also taught. We shared this adventure with our children Sara, Núria, and Adrià. Jordi was born three years later.

El Priorat, an inland and harsh region but with a strong personality, did not offer many prospects back then, at the beginning of the 80s, and the majority of young people left their villages at the slightest chance. The area needed a plan for the future and, like with any good plan for the future, this involved the fields of education and training. And the plan was finally implemented. In 1982, Mr Jaume Ciurana i Galcerán, director of INCAVI (Catalan Institute of the Vine and Wine) proposed us to open a new specialty in the school: Viticulture and Oenology, a three-year course program. This was a specialty that had been very recently created and the school in Falset was one of the first schools in Spain offering the program. You can check the photo gallery of the beginning of the school.

Since we did not know anything about that field, we employed outside teachers so that we could start the new project.

In 1983, a new facility is built next to the main school building where the specialties connected with the winery, laboratory, ageing and tasting will be taught. We devote most of our time to studying, experimenting, and , together with the students, making wine with the grapes harvested in the school’s property but also buying grapes to neighbouring wine makers. This wine was sold to the school’s students and half the benefits were spent on new laboratory material to do experiments and the other half went on the end-of-year trip.

On these trips we visited wineries and vineyards in the main European wine growing regions. Every year we went to a different region: Bordeaux, Burgundy, Piamonte, Champagne, Alsace, Rheingau, Valais, etc. Back then there were no low-cost trips or low-cost accommodation like now, and even the Internet was not available, that meant we had to do all we could so that the trips were as cheap as possible. We travelled by bus, we had our tents and put them up in camp sites where we spent the night. There was a cook in the group, Rafel, who cook us dinner every day after our visits. We had a wonderful time and, what’s most important, those were extremely profitable experiences for the students.

I would like to stress the methodology we used. Most of the academic topics became experimental and illustrative. We designed “experiences” that the students had to do and the most significant were selected to take part in the CIRIT competition organised by Generalitat de Catalunya, which was devoted to research carried out at schools. We won on different occasions and the money awarded also went on the organisation of those trips.

I love teaching and those were wonderful years that I really enjoyed. For me it was a privilege to have been able to somehow contribute in the education of those young people who were so willing to learn. Their parents were mostly wine makers in the region who were quite disappointed with the terrible situation of wine making at the time and they were undergoing a metamorphosis that gradually led them to wish to work the old vineyards of the family, make their own wine and change and revive El Priorat.