The red 2022 Terroir Històric was produced with a blend of 75% Garnacha and 25% Cariñena from nine different villages where the soils are also different—slate, clay, granite and alluvial—from vines of around 20 years of age. The full clusters fermented with natural yeasts, and the wine matured for six months in stainless steel tanks. It's the ripest of the reds from 2022, with 14% alcohol but kept good freshness and a pH of 3.54. It's primary and juicy, young and tender, with fine tannins. Easy to drink. 30,000 bottles produced. It was bottled between April and May 2023.

Reviewed by Luis Gutiérrez, Published: May 16, 2024
Since 2021, Dominik Huber has worked exclusively with concrete and a little stainless steel, and he sold all the oak he had in the cellar. He would like to build a new winery and is buying and planting new vineyards for the white wines and planting Garnatxa Peluda in Montsant. He has started working on the analysis of the soils with Chilean expert Pedro Parra. And he and his winemaker and partner Tatjana Peceric had a baby girl, Filipa, in September 2022. Congratulations! The organic certification of the winery will be completed with the 2024 harvest.

They currently work around 21 hectares, mostly owned and some rented with long-term contracts, allowing them to produce around 100,000 bottles per year. I tasted the 2022s, which was a warmer and drier year (350 liters of rain compared with the 490 liters in 2021), and that is reflected in wines with more body and structure, with lower yields but a healthy crop, and the maceration and extraction was adjusted accordingly. The top wines from 2022 felt very austere and ungiving. I wish I had a time machine to see them in five years or so.

Terroir Históric is Dominik Huber’s nod to the wines of Priorat before the region turned toward bigger, more powerful wines, influenced by French winemaking techniques and American critics. The idea is to capture Priorat as a whole, drawing from organically certified vineyards across the region’s steep hillsides. These sites range from slate and schist to clay, limestone, granite, and alluvial soils, with both shaded and sunny exposures at elevations of 350 to 800 meters.

The Históric Negre is 75% Grenache and 25% Carignan, roughly the same blend you would have found here a generation ago. A good portion of the Grenache comes from La Morera, high in the Montsant range, where clay and limestone soils bring a different dimension to the blend. The remaining fruit comes from slate and schist vineyards throughout Priorat, contributing that savory, mineral character so closely associated with the region. Fermentation takes place with whole clusters and native yeasts, followed by six months in a 5,000-liter concrete tank.