Escaladei’s brightness and discretion were the main factors for King Alfonso el Trovador’s 1194 decision to cede his lands there to the Carthusian Order for them to repopulate those lands, conquered to the Moslems. The order’s founder, Saint Bruno, built it up around the ideas of solitary life, silence and the concept of eremitic community. Under these background ideas, and although the order already existed in previous times, the Carthusian monks coming from the Provence cultivated the vineyards with the rocky Montsant range behind them.
Their constructions in this territorial domain culminated in the building of the Escaladei’s Carthusian order monastery. Others, like the conreria (cultivation land), or the current Masia Duch’s original edification, located in the area around the monastery, were used to lodge monks, lays and workers concerned with agrarian tasks and dependent on the monastery’s prior.
Those were the people who, through their monastic knowledge, together with the region’s climatological and orographic conditions, specially the soil’s –llicorella-, extended such an essential crop as vine, which has identified our region, the Priorat, until our days.
Little by little the new lands were being populated with the support of the monastery’s rule. By the 13th century the wine production had already been spread out and the splendour of the wines was bound to be successful. In the 14th century the grenache grape consolidated as a perfectly acclimatized variety, which, together with the deeper knowledge of oenologic nature, wisely combined with the characteristics of the peculiar licorella, resulted in high quality harvests.
Masia Duch’s «Priorat» wines are the inheritors of that vocation, both because they belong to the same land, and also due to the production belief based on a honest ideology respectful with the Priorat. |
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