Celler Vall Llach

Founded in the mid 1990s, bodega Celler Vall Llach is the dream of, ironically, two teetotallers: Enric Costa, notary public, and Lluís Llach, one of Catalonia’s best-known songwriters. A project with a deep social conscience, the winery was founded to help improving the life conditions of a region, Priorat, which in the late XXth was undergoing a severe economic crisis motivated, above all, by rampant rural depopulation.

Located in Porrera -a historic Priorat village that in 1994 was heavily impacted by a flood- the Vall Llach winery understood that the only way for guaranteeing the continuity of the agricultural activity in an area as difficult and unforgiving as Priorat required giving incentives to quality by substantially increasing the price that local winegrowers were payed for their grapes. As a result, the price the winery payed per kilo of grapes multiplied by thirteen only four years later. The first harvest was in 1998, and the wines of Vall Llach were launched onto the market in 2000. In 2013, as a result of the unexpected death of Enric Costa, his son, Albert Costa, a graduate agricultural engineer and oenologist, took the helm of the project. He is currently the winery’s technical director and main shareholder.

The estate vineyards of bodega Celler Vall Llach cover a surface area of 51 hectares, composed of the legenday slate (llicorella) soils from Priorat. Certified organic since 2013, a significant part of the vineyards are small plots (trossos) of Grenache and Carignan vines, some of which are over 100 years of age. Upon starting the project, the winery planted a few hectares of the international varieties Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah and Viognier. Some years later, bodega Vall Llach began recovering several long-forgotten local varieties, like Escanyavella, White Carignan and Grey Carignan. Besides the estate vineyards, the winery buys grapes from 15 hectares owned by local winegrowers.

The wines of Celler Vall Llach are vinified at La Final, a historic building in Porrera that, after having been almost completely destroyed by the Filomena snowstorm in 2021, was rebuilt and equipped with state-of-the-art winemaking technology. The product porfolio encompasses the whole of the Priorat quality pyramid, starting at the bottom with the entry-level Embruix, a regional red wine, the white and red bottlings of Porrera, village wines, the Vi de Paratge Mas d’en Caçador and, at the peak of the
pyramid, the mighty Mas de la Rosa, one of the few Priorat wines qualified as Gran Vinya Classificada. It is worth mentioning that, fom the 2020s onwards, the winery redefined the traditional house style, avoiding overripe and over-extracted grapes, going for bigger wooden containers and using new materials like concrete. Average production is 100,000 bottles per year, 75% of which are sold in the international market.

• Year of foundation: 1996
• Address: Carrer Pont, 9
• City: Porrera
  
• Province: Tarragona
• Zip code: 43739
  
• Country: Spain
• Phone number: 34 977 828 244
  
• www.vallllach.com
• Guided visits? Yes
• Wine tourism services? Yes

Designations of origin:

Priorat

Red wine varieties:

Carignan, Grenache, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot.

White wine varieties:

White Carignan, Viognier.