Mas Martinet Bru 2016

Mas Martinet Bru 2016, 14.5%, Priorato, Spain

($39, €18-22, £18.68 Justerini & Brooks)

Catalonia is one of our favourite wine regions on the planet.

It’s such a beautiful part of the world. Amazing food and wine. Wonderful people. A Mediterranean coastline that veers from the tourisy to the undiscovered. And the wines…beyond Cava, they aren’t very well known, but are well worth discovering.

Priorat, and it satellite Montsant, make wines that are full-flavoured and expansive but also strangely elegant and beguiling.

This is an excellent value bottling from one of Priorat’s best estates, Mas Martinet. It’s a blend of half Garnacha, a third Syrah and the rest Cabernet Sauvignon and Cariñena.

It’s spicy, dense and slightly wild. It cries out for food and will age well (I tried the 2006 out of magnum at the same tasting and it was still going strong).

Two other, more expensive wines worth tipping from this estate are the Cami Pesseroles 2014 (£55), a scented yet electric red, and the utterly heavenly Ranci Dolc NV (£47 per half), a sweet wine made in a ‘solera’ system which brims with muscovado and baked fruit complexity.

[Drink Well Eat Well – Mediterranean Diet]

(Peter, 7/10, Feb 2019)