Morlanda Costers del Prior Priorat 2018

Intense cherry red in colour. The primary aromas are dominated by ripe black fruit, typically mulberries and blackberries, but there is also a light touch of lavender flower; a hint from its ageing in French oak barrels, but there are also high levels of secondary aromas; spicy notes of black pepper along with some smokey, toasty and tobacco. Elegant on the palate, with balanced and integrated acidity; well structured with some meaty flavours, and again a great intensity of toasty, smokey flavours to balance the mulberry and blackberry flavours.

The 2018 harvest at our Priorat estate began in the first week of September, a quite normal date for us. Broadly speaking, Spring and Summer 2018 were very good for the development of ripe, healthy grapes: Spring with good rainfall levels returned our vineyards to more balanced water levels, following the intense drought they suffered in 2016 and 2017. Summer was, in general, cooler than normal, meaning fewer days of heat waves in which the thermometers registered levels as high as 38 and 39oC for several consecutive days. June and July produced very little rainfall, but in August there was some welcome rain which came as a relief to the vineyards and helped the ripening process.

Costers del Prior is made from grapes grown on our Els Palells Estate, located at Bellmunt del Priorat (in the south of DOQ Priorat) where the winery is also located. The harvest was a few days earlier than expected, beginning with the picking of Garnacha at the beginning of September, following appropriate monitoring of the grapes in the field. At Viticultors del Priorat grapes are harvested manually and brought to the winery in small, 18kg capacity boxes, where they are crushed and then transferred to stainless steel tanks of 10,000 l capacity at controlled temperature. During the course of fermentation there is daily pumping over and tasting to control the wine’s evolution and to decide the optimum moment for racking and pressing. After 15 days in tank the wine was pressed and racked; malolactic fermentation was done in stainless steel tanks using indigenous bacteria.

Following malolactic fermentation the wine was transferred to French oak barrels of 300 l capacity where it was aged for 10 months.