Clos De L'Obac

  1. Home
  2. Clos De L'Obac

PASTRANA JARQUE FAMILY

The marriage of journalist Carles Pastrana (Tarragona) and oenologist Mariona Jarque (Barcelona) embarked, in the late seventies, on the adventure of their lives by dedicating their family and professional future to the project of reviving Priorat wines and subsequently promoting these wines on an international scale. Thirty years after those beginnings, together with their two children Guillem and Iona, the essential future of this story, they have consolidated a project that is now known worldwide.
 

DOQ PRIORAT

In 1979, Carles Pastrana and Mariona Jarque revived the family winemaking tradition, embarking on a long journey aimed at rescuing the ancient Carthusian wines in the heart of the lands once overseen by the former priors of Scala Dei, a monastery located in the Priorat region. They established the Clos de l’Obac and Miserere estates, replanting vineyards along the banks of the Siurana River in the southern pre-coastal area of Catalonia, and founded the Clos de l’Obac winery. Starting in 1989, they produced their first wines, and CLOS DE L’OBAC was recognized by the World Guide as one of the 150 best wines in the world.
 

 A little bit of history?

At the end of the 1970s, the Pastrana & Jarque couple (Clos de l’Obac) together with a friend from that time, René Barbier (Clos Mogador), son of a family of wine merchants in Tarragona, began replanting vineyards in Priorat with the aim of producing great wines.

For more than ten years, the project did not attract the interest of wine professionals, nor did it enjoy the trust of financial institutions or organizations due to its large scale, geographical location, the lack of financial resources of the promoters, and the practically nonexistent oenological knowledge of almost all the people who, during the ten years from 1979 to 1989, formed a group that, despite everything, ultimately succeeded beyond expectations in achieving the purpose for which it was created. Thus, in the early eighties, the chemist Toni Basté (Clos Basté Krug), a Catalan residing in Strasbourg, joined the team; shortly after, Fernando García (Clos Setién), a wine importer in Frankfurt, followed; and in 1986, the biologist and head of the School of Oenology at the Falset Vocational Training Institute, Josep L. Pérez (Clos Martinet), finally joined.

The five, together with a neighbor from Gratallops who was a farmer, Antonio Rosario (Clos Ballesteros Jové), form the core group of the entire project, a core that was definitively closed in 1987 with the establishment of an agricultural company, and the integration into it of the Englishman Adrian Garsed (Clos Garsed), and the Flemish Luc Van Iseghem (Clos dels Llops), both wine merchants in London and Ostend, respectively. In 1989 and 1990, before bottling the first harvest, a Swiss lady, Daphe Glorian (Clos Erasmus) and a young man from Rioja, Álvaro Palacios (Clos Dofí), joined the project, although they never became part of the company.

 

 The wines from the Clos de l’Obac and Miserere estates, as well as those from the Dolç de l’Obac and Kyrie vineyards, follow a blending system based on a pattern that repeats grape varieties and percentages each year, according to the four specific blends chosen for each of the four wines. The purpose of this system is that, each year, the characteristics of our continental and Mediterranean climate define by contrast the personality and character of each wine and vintage, rather than the characteristics of a wine with a random blend being used to justify or define a vintage.

 

Subsequently, the wine, always by gravity, is transferred to the aging room in French oak barrels of the Limousin, Allier, and Nevers varieties, where it will remain for between ten and fifteen months depending on the characteristics of the vintage. During this time, it undergoes decantations through manually controlled racking by candlelight, in order to separate and regularly remove the lees that settle at the bottom of the barrels and could spoil the wine by altering its good flavors and aromas.