One wine. Four years. Four characters. Mític is made with the same method every year. What changes is the year itself. Here is what each season gave.
A mild, wet winter, then a cool summer with light hail in June. September rains, three times the usual, gave higher acidity and lower alcohol.
Snow covered the vineyards for three days in February. A hot, dry summer followed and the grapes ripened in good health.
Three days of heavy rain in April delayed flowering. Wind and constant sun kept the vines healthy, and a warm September gave a slow, even ripening.
A dry spring and a mild summer with wide day–night swings. Heavy rain at harvest meant picking vineyard by vineyard; three-quarters Cariñena.
Laurona’s vineyards lie in different villages, from about 120 to 700 metres, on schist, clay-limestone and granite, with vines more than sixty years old. No single place makes Laurona. The blend does.
Altitude and cool nights bring freshness and tension.
More warmth, rounder, more open fruit.
Each variety and each place is aged apart, then brought together with time in mind: how the wine will taste years from now, not this year.
Pliny the Elder praises the wines of Lauro, beside those of Tarraco, for their elegance. Our wine Plini is named after him.
In Switzerland, Roland Fischer’s Fischer & Rihs becomes one of the country’s benchmark wine merchants, until 2001. He pours Clos Mogador, Vega Sicilia, Rayas and Château Musar before the world agrees they are legendary.
René Barbier Senior asks Roland Fischer whether great wine has a future in this overlooked corner of Catalonia. He has already tasted the answer.
René Barbier Senior founds Celler Laurona in Falset, with Christopher Cannan, who finds the name in old books.
The DO Montsant is created. Laurona is already making wine here.
Wine Spectator Top 100: Laurona 2000 at #95, when the estate is three years old.
A great year. Part of it is held back in the library and released, years later, as Cronos.
In The New York Times, Eric Asimov writes about Laurona 2006 in “Spanish Reds That Emerge From the Shadows”.
Fiona Fischer comes to La Figuera and founds Galilea by Fiona, her own wines. The first is Pythagora.
The Fischer family acquires Celler Laurona, the winery Roland Fischer saw born.
René Barbier Senior hands Fiona Fischer the Laurona cellar and the care of its blends. She becomes the winemaker. Old vines, each variety aged apart, released only when ready.
The last vintage René Barbier Senior and Fiona made side by side.
Seventeen wines and vintages, from 2007 to 2022, ready to pour.
A library is made by people who wait. Four of them carry the Laurona story.
One of the pioneers who brought the old vines of the Priorat back to the world’s attention, with Clos Mogador. In 1998 he turned to the overlooked slopes around it, which would become the DO Montsant, and in 1999 he founded Celler Laurona there. Cronos is his wine. Blanc de Laurona was for years his favourite white. He taught Fiona to read the vineyards and to blend with the years in mind.
For almost four decades, from 1963 to 2001, his Swiss company Fischer & Rihs poured the wines the world would later call legendary. In 1998 René Barbier Senior came to him with a question: did great wine have a future in this corner of Catalonia? He watched Laurona being born. In 2016 the Fischer family took it into its care.
Trained at the École hôtelière de Lausanne, she worked in Dubai and China, including more than three years with Fairmont and Jumeirah, before wine called her. In 2014 she came to La Figuera, fell for its old Grenache and made Pythagora, her first wine. For four years she worked beside René Barbier Senior; in 2018 he handed her the Laurona cellar. Today she makes the wines and leads the estate. “Nature speaks. I translate.”
Twenty-seven years in the Laurona cellar, since the very first vintages. Every bottle in the library has passed through his hands, and through his care.
We farm organically by conviction, but we hold no organic or biodynamic certificate. Other estates here do that work very well. We would rather tell you what we can show.
Some wines wait years for the right moment.
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