Alvaro Palacios, L'Ermita, Priorat 2024

The 2024 L'Ermita was bottled a little earlier, together with La Baixada. It comes from a very promising vintage for more elegant and cooler wines than the two previous years but also more powerful, darker, fuller and with more extract and volume. This is very young and in need of time. This blend of 90% Garnacha, 6% Cariñena, 3% Picapoll Negre and 1% Garnacha Blanca, Macabeo and Pedro Ximénez (PX) fermented in oak vats with indigenous yeasts, part destemmed, part uncrushed, and matured in oval French oak foudres for 12 months. It comes in at 13.9% alcohol, which is amazing because it was harvested on the 25th of October, with a pH of 3.38 and 5.32 grams of acidity, parameters of balance and very good freshness. This was the most elegant of the 2024s, with a chalky and stony quality, filigreed and refined, with elegant tannins. It took time in the glass to unfurl its multidimensional and kaleidoscopic personality, cold and stony. But it's all very subtle and very elegant, with power but with an ethereal side, like liquid silk. They only bottled the old vines; they had more wine (the younger vines have 20+ years), but they discarded it. It could have the category of old vines as defined by the Priorat appellation. 2,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in February 2026.

• Drinking Window: 2027 - 2042
• Reviewer Name: Luis Gutierrez
• Review Date: May 2026