Clos Mogador

The Free Bacchus Story

The old vineyards René Barbier found above Gratallops had survived for an unglamorous reason: they were too remote and too unproductive for any conventional agricultural programme to have bothered reaching them. The chemical era simply passed them by.

Barbier is one of five winemakers who re-established Priorat as a serious region in the late 1980s, and Clos Mogador, old-vine Garnacha and Cariñena on black llicorella slate made since 1989, is the founding reference for the modern Priorat style. The estate is farmed to certified organic standards with regenerative and biodynamic practices across the terraces. Keeping the chemistry out was as much preservation of what was already there as it was conversion.

Barbier bought his first Priorat vineyard in 1979 and drew together Josep Lluís Pérez, Carles Pastrana, Álvaro Palacios and Daphné Glorian. Five people restarted an appellation that had effectively stopped.

The Clos Mogador has drawn 97 points from Wine Advocate and belongs in any serious collection of Spanish wine. Manyetes, a single-vineyard Garnacha from one of the oldest parcels, is more limited and arguably the more revealing bottle for anyone following how the estate has developed.

Barbier's influence extends well past his own labels: several of his children have established estates of their own in the region, which makes Clos Mogador something like a founding institution in a wine region barely thirty years old.