Clos Mogador

René Barbier is one of the five winemakers who re-established Priorat as a serious wine region in the late 1980s, and Clos Mogador — his own estate and the wine he has made from old vine Garnacha and Cariñena on black llicorella slate since 1989 — is the founding reference point for the modern Priorat style.

The estate is farmed under certified organic standards with regenerative and biodynamic practices across the llicorella terraces above Gratallops. The farming philosophy at Mogador was part of the original Priorat revival project — Barbier and his collaborators were working on old, neglected vineyards that had survived precisely because no conventional agricultural programme had reached them, and maintaining the chemical-free approach was as much a preservation of what was already there as a philosophical conversion.

The Clos Mogador has drawn 97 points from Wine Advocate and is considered one of the five or six essential bottles from Priorat in any serious collection of Spanish wine. The Manyetes — a single-vineyard Garnacha from one of the estate's oldest parcels — is more limited and arguably the more interesting wine for those tracking the evolution of the estate.

Barbier's influence on a generation of Priorat producers — including several of his own children, who have established their own estates in the region — makes Clos Mogador something close to a founding institution in a wine region that is thirty years old.