The only wine from Catalonia within a monastery (still active) is a jewel of La Conca

Today we're going to the only winery in Catalonia that's inside a monastery—and still active!—with thirty monks there. The Poblet Abbey, owned by Codorniu. When winemaker Ricard Rofes shows it to some American visitors, and before entering, they pause in awe at the doorway, he always jokes with them: "Relax, this is all papier-mâché!" The truth is, we have our royalty buried in this monastery.

The winemakers who work on the project day-to-day are Jaume Pujol and Judit Sabaté. Ricard, that friend of mine who smells of the world as if it were wine and smells of wine as if it were the world (and now, reading the sentence I just wrote, he'll laugh at me a lot), goes from time to time, above all, to help "make their work easier and chat while they do it."

"It's raining! Wait, I'll stop the car!" he says. Because I catch him between Falset and Gratallops, heading towards Scala Dei, the other winery where he works. "We've had 230 liters of rain fall on the Fontauvella Tower since March 1st, like a gift from the rain god, as El Último de la Fila used to say..."

A preserved heritage

Ricard's hand is there at the moment of "planning" the wine, which is already ten years old. The first vintage was in 2014. Until then, they made Pinot Noir. And why? Because of Cava. Pinot, for Cava, is very good in La Conca, because it's reefed in August and you can harvest it with acidity. But La Conca de Barberà, as its name suggests, is a basin. This means that in summer the warm air is closed in, and in winter, the cold. "With this, a Pinot was only interesting in cold years. And we said: La Cuenca has managed to preserve its winemaking heritage like no one else. They've taken care of the drilling, the Garrut, the Tempranillo... Well, we make wines that represent the place. And that's how the Abadía de Poblet wines are born. The white is the majority." A Macabeo that comes from three vineyards at an altitude of between 600 and 700 meters, below the village of Forès. "It's an old vine, eighty or ninety years old; the vines look like trees..." The yield is around 2,000 or 3,000 kg per hectare. "We directly press the Macabeo. And the other ten, fifteen, twenty percent, which is Parellada (about fifty years old), is somewhat bland, a poor thing, and wouldn't be the star of the white varieties. To give it a bit of substance, we ferment it halfway with the skins." It's not a brisa, then, because it should ferment to the end to be one, if I understand correctly.

It's aged. Half in French oak foudre and the other half in cement. The part in the foudre is to prepare the wine for its life in the bottle. And the part in cement, to preserve the tension, the acidity. It's Ricard's obsession, I'd say, for the wines to have that verticality. "We've learned to harvest earlier for freshness, so that it's a long-lasting wine."

And it is. "If you try an eighteenth-century vintage now, for example, you'll see that it retains the stone fruit, the peach, and so on, but also those buttery notes." Yes, like these Burgundy Chardonnays, which are so rich, so dense. Today, with Ricard's health in mind, who has endless talent (and that's why he surrounds himself with endlessly talented people), I'll uncork this wine and pair it with a roast pork, very fatty. I'm excited to imagine the cellar where this wine sleeps before it's released, like the cellar of the monk Dom Pérignon. I like this wine, which expresses Cuenca, which explains so many things from the past and looks to the future.

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