Terroir al Límit

Terroir al Límit is the personal project of Dominik Huber, a lover of the Priorat, a land he arrived in 1996. The preliminary history of this winery began back in the year 2000, when Dominik and Eben Sadie, a South African winemaker, met at Mas Martinet. In 2001, they met again in Cims de Porrera and a friendship developed between them that grew to the point where they decided to work together for a few months in South Africa. Back in Priorat and with the invaluable help of the Pérez family and some of their grapes, they began to make a small quantity of their own wine on the Mas Martinet premises, which would be released under the name Dits del Terra 2001. Two years later, the two friends decided to set off on their own and moved to Torroja del Priorat, where they began to work with Jaume Sabaté, a winegrower with deep roots in the region. The first wines are intense and oaky and do not fully please their makers. In 2007 they settle in Torroja for good and the Terroir al Límit project officially begins, with Jaume's strong influence as an essential ingredient for understanding the changes that would occur in the winery's wines. Eben decides to return to the family winery in South Africa and Dominik continues to work alongside Jaume at the head of the winery; listening to him convinces Dominik that he is mistaken in his way of interpreting Priorat and the style of his wines begins to change.

Since then, the wines of Terroir al Límit have been the subject of heated controversy, as the winery produces wines that have little in common with the more usual Priorat wines. According to Dominik and Jaume (now partners), the wines that were made in the Priorat in the past, before the arrival of the pioneers, were very different to the current ones. They are trying to recover a wine profile in which the grape, the soil and the climate are the true protagonists, and not the wood, as happens too often. In a reinterpretation of those original wines, they are committed to shorter macerations, larger barrels, early harvests and fermentations with stems, always in search of freshness and varietal transparency. The result is a series of exciting but atypical wines, which attract detractors and unconditional fans in equal measure, wines that draw a new Priorat or, perhaps, an old one?