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Buy any 6 bottles and save 5%. Buy any 12 bottles and save 10% (excludes wines on offer). Free UK delivery on orders over £100. Tel: 02922 337454
Buy any 6 bottles and save 5%. Buy any 12 bottles and save 10% (excludes wines on offer). Free UK delivery on orders over £100. Tel: 02922 337454
2022 L'Ermita, Alvaro Palacios

2022 L'Ermita, Alvaro Palacios

Priorat, Spain

Slate Crown

This is one of Spain’s great red wines: rare, profound and almost impossibly refined for Priorat. Wild raspberry, red cherry and pomegranate lead the nose, followed by violet, orange peel, lavender, white pepper, tobacco, wild herbs and crushed slate. It has the intensity of old-vine Garnacha from llicorella soils, but the impression is not heavy or forced; it is lifted, aromatic and beautifully controlled.

On the palate, it is silky, mineral and deeply precise, with red and black fruit carried by fine tannins, fresh acidity and a long, stony finish. Cariñena adds savoury grip, while the tiny touch of local white varieties brings lift and delicacy. This is a collector’s bottle in every sense: already mesmerising with air, but built for long ageing and destined to gain even more depth, perfume and harmony over time.

For when
A once-in-a-decade dinner deserves the legend.

Pairs with
Roast lamb, milk-fed lamb shoulder, venison loin, aged beef, wild mushroom dishes, roast quail, suckling pig, truffle risotto, rosemary-scented lentils or hard aged cheeses.

L’Ermita is Álvaro Palacios’ most iconic wine and one of the defining bottles of modern Spanish fine wine. Grown in a tiny, steep vineyard above Gratallops, it captures the essence of Priorat at its most graceful: old vines, fractured slate soils, tiny yields and extraordinary concentration without excess. Classified as Gran Vinya Classificada, the top vineyard category in Priorat, it is a wine of rarity, precision and remarkable emotional pull.

Whats in the bottle
92% Garnacha, 7% Cariñena and 1% of the local whites, Garnacha Blanca, Macabeo and Pedro Ximénez

Notable Awards
99 points – Decanter, Sarah Jane Evans MW

£1,100.00 - £1,100.00
£1,100.00
£1,100.00 - £1,100.00
£1,100.00
Availability:
3 in stock, ready to be shipped

Álvaro Palacios is one of the great figures of modern Spanish wine. Born into the Palacios Remondo family in Rioja, he arrived in Priorat at the end of the 1980s and became central to the region’s transformation from a remote, almost forgotten corner of Catalonia into one of Europe’s most admired fine-wine landscapes.

His work in Priorat focuses on old Garnacha and Cariñena vines grown on steep, slate-rich slopes around Gratallops. Rather than making wines of sheer power alone, Palacios has helped define a more refined vision of the region: intense but graceful, deeply mineral, aromatic and expressive of individual vineyards.

L’Ermita is the pinnacle of that work. It comes from a tiny vineyard beside the hermitage above Gratallops, producing one of Spain’s rarest and most collectible reds. For customers, Álvaro Palacios represents absolute confidence: a producer with global reputation, deep regional understanding and a track record for wines that combine rarity, beauty and genuine ageing potential.

The 2022 L’Ermita is a blend of 92% Garnacha, 7% Cariñena and 1% local white varieties, including Garnacha Blanca, Macabeo and Pedro Ximénez. Fruit was selected from 2.28 hectares within the 4.7-hectare L’Ermita vineyard in Gratallops, with vines planted in 1909, 1939 and 1996. The wine is classified as Gran Vinya Classificada, the highest vineyard category in Priorat.

The grapes were fermented with indigenous yeasts in oak vats, with part of the fruit included as full clusters. Maceration lasted 23 days, followed by ageing in French oak oval foudres for around 14 months. Production was extremely limited at 4,930 bottles, and alcohol is 14.5%.