For the time being, we can still enjoy Priorat’s great wines. I heard once that beauty attracts intelligence and Priorat is a good justification for this assertion; it seems as if the region’s concentration of natural wonders incites bright people to move there. Priorat is a most exciting innovation hub for top wines. There are new styles, lots of experimentation, and amazing advances in careful viticulture and precision winemaking. Human ingenuity is, for now, compensating for the challenges provided by nature.

Thanks to this, there is little in common between the original Priorat style of wine – quite massive, powerful, with extreme ripeness – and the array of modern styles. Most wines follow a style that is an improvement on the wines of the 1990s. While power and oak ageing are the most prevalent features of old Priorat wines, now there is increasing finesse and complexity. Overripe aromas of the past are now anecdotal and cleanliness is the norm. Many variations are found but basically most wines are a blend of Garnacha, which provides the fruit, and Cariñena, which provides the flesh. Some of those wines are great.

Having said that, I would like to highlight three wine styles that were not even suspected 30 years ago but now represent peaks in quality and, most of all, something that is unmistakably, uniquely, Priorat.

First, we have the new expressions of red Garnacha wines. Garnacha – the intensely fruity but slightly heady, most genuine grape variety in Priorat, the one that used to be made with high extraction and oak to produce wines with deep colour, firm tannins and spicy aromas – is now used to make something completely different. Post-modern, single-vineyard Garnacha wines are pale, with some lavender reflections. Their aromas are floral, with more red cherry than red berry fruit, and almost ethereal. They are delicate on the palate, deceptively fragile, with impressively long and complex finishes. Some of the top wines in this report follow this pattern; they are charming, unique, inimitable.

A second top Priorat profile is made from old Cariñena vines, yielding wines with a magnificent, memorable mouthfeel. This profile is defined by extremely fine tannins; original, understated aromas; poised finishes with unique class. One does not drink top Cariñena from Priorat but feels it. The Cariñena grape that was despised 30 years ago because of its poor aromatics is now adored because of its texture. If only there were more of it.

My third profile of excellence concerns white wines. Garnacha Blanca is the most important grape variety in the region and many of the wines are very good. They aren’t, however, exclusive to Priorat: neighbouring Montsant and Terra Alta now produce many great Garnacha Blanca wines that compare well with their Priorat siblings. Priorat’s Garnacha Blanca is not a profile of exclusive excellence.

There are some old plantings of another grape variety in the region, one which is responsible for amazingly unique wines to Priorat. It is a genuine Catalan grape variety because it represents something crucial to Catalonia; good genes that came from elsewhere. The variety, Pedro Ximénez, is of Andalusian origin. It is behind most wines from Montilla-Moriles; there is even a type of sherry wines, the PX, named after it. In Priorat, when planted in old vineyards, it gets an amazingly complex aromatic profile, a moving and extremely original fruit expression. There is something wonderfully awkward about Pedro Ximénez wines from Priorat, as if the wine came from two soils: the liquorella from Priorat that gives juiciness and depth and the albariza from Montilla that provides a chalky mouthfeel and amazing freshness. There is no albariza in Priorat, of course.

Pedro Ximénez from Priorat is destined to be an inimitable classic. I would also bet on its capacity to age in bottle. My hope, now that people tend to drink less red and more white wine, is that Priorat offers us more top Pedro Ximénez like the few I tasted this year.

I tasted 87 wines blind at the appellation headquarters, 75 of which scored 90 points or more. I can only reaffirm what I said last year: Priorat is at the top of Spain’s appellations. Enjoy its wines, with this new diversity that still manages to convey a common sense of origin. I do hope that water will feed the vineyards in Priorat again, so that we will be able to drink the wines and enjoy the landscape for many more years to come.