"When you grow up going tomato picking with your grandfather, you also develop certain values ​​and a culinary identity." Martí Mestre Domènech is a young chef trained at the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche di Pollenzo in Italy, who has been fortunate enough to have his culinary training at home in the Priorat region. "The fact that my other grandfather and mother ran the Hotel Hostal Sport definitely sparked my curiosity for gastronomy." Today, he works alongside his colleague Andrea Picchione, whom he met at the university. slow foodThey act as nomadic chefs; they travel to the place, read about it, understand it, and then cook it in the most honest and sincere way, with "powerful minimalism," he clarifies. At university, he learned that "gastronomy is everything because we have evolved through food." And he adds: "Cooking is becoming aware of the world we live in; it's a process of food transformation that begins with a tuber."

With one year remaining until the Montsant DO reaches its 25th anniversary, the DO's president, Pilar Just, affirms that they are working to update the regulations. Currently, wines produced are classified with the winegrower-producer, bottler-producer, and marketer distinctions. The new regulations aim for the labeling to also indicate whether it is a single-site wine, a village wine, a regional wine, and new classifications. "We want transparency with the new categories, because we are the only designation of origin that knows 100% the traceability of its wines," affirms the president, who recalls that hers is the generation that was pushed to live outside the region. "I myself am from a generation of people our parents believed was lost, because they didn't want us to stay living or working in the villages of the Priorat region, which was the poorest in Catalonia," Just recalls. They told them to leave, but at the same time, without realizing it, they instilled in them an appreciation for the land. And so many left, pursued studies and professional careers, and when they realized they didn't like it, they returned home. "I worked doing statistics to work with prediction models for companies, but this job didn't fulfill me, so I decided to leave everything and return home, to Pradell de la Teixeta, where I bought a farm, Mas d'en Rafel, and started from scratch, planting vines," he says. Today his wines are produced under the name San Rafael wineryAt that time, the DO Montsant didn't even exist (it was created in 2001), and the wines produced belonged to the DO Tarragona, Falset sub-zone.

This is the story of the miracle of wine in Priorat, however. On May 2, 3, and 4, the starting gun is being held in Falset for the thirtieth edition of the Wine Fair, which will continue to organize tastings at the various wineries in Priorat throughout the month. The anniversary comes in a rather complicated context: wine consumption is declining—younger people aren't drinking—and the drought, which has passed but everyone is certain will return, has reduced the grape harvest by 35%. The only thing missing from this reality are US President Donald Trump's threats of tariffs, which will complicate wine exports to the United States, one of the countries that sends the most (and most expensive) wines to Priorat. However, thirty years after the first Falset Wine Fair, it is a good opportunity to look back and take stock. ARA has spoken with some of the people who, more than 30 years ago, believed the region had an unmissable opportunity and who bet everything on the vineyard, which can only thrive in this terrain of difficult slopes dominated by native slate. "What happened in Priorat couldn't happen anywhere else," says winemaker and viticulturist René Barbier, almost 40 years after acquiring his first estate in the region, of which he has nothing but love. "There is extraordinary intelligence in Priorat," he asserts.