The Childhood Friends, the Old Cooperative & the Rebellion of Llicorella

Agustí Perelló and Jordi Escoda are not outsiders who discovered Priorat — they are sons of the slate, born and raised among the steep, sun-scorched costers of one of Spain's most mythologised wine regions. Their story does not begin with a grand inheritance or a prestigious enology degree. It begins with friendship — two boys who grew up together in the shadow of Montsant, who learned the landscape before they learned to make wine, and who eventually decided that the best way to honour their home was to reject everything that had made Priorat famous.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Priorat underwent a renaissance that transformed it from a forgotten, depopulated backwater into one of the world's most expensive wine regions. Pioneers like René Barbier, Álvaro Palacios, and Daphne Glorian recognised the potential of old Carinyena and Garnatxa vines on Llicorella soil, and they produced wines of such concentration, oak, and power that the region was elevated to DOCa status — one of only two in Spain. But that renaissance came with a template: low yields, long macerations, new French barriques, and prices that soared into the hundreds and thousands of euros. Agustí and Jordi watched this transformation from the inside, and they chose a different path.

They began Los Comuns not in a gleaming new cellar but in an old cooperative in the municipality of Garcia — a building that had seen the history of Priorat's bulk-wine past and was waiting for someone to give it a new purpose. There, in a space that smells of old stone and fermented grapes, they set up a winery that is the antithesis of the Priorat luxury brand. Their equipment is minimal. Their production is microscopic. Their approach is deliberately, almost defiantly, artisanal. Each year, they carry out between 25 and 35 micro-vinifications, each one between 100kg and 1,000kg of grapes, treated as a separate parcel, a separate conversation with the vintage. Large parcels are divided into multiple harvests, each vinified separately. It is a workload that would break most commercial wineries — and it is exactly how Agustí and Jordi believe wine should be made.

Perhaps the most telling choice they have made is their refusal to seek organic certification. In their own words, they do not believe in the institutions that approve such labels, nor in the heavy bureaucracy of certifications and paperwork. They believe in the trust of the customer who buys their wine — a trust earned through transparency, not through a stamp. They use no fungicides, no herbicides. They leave spontaneous cover crops. They apply sulfur, nettle, and horsetail for the vines. They use pheromones for the sexual confusion of lobesia. Their farming is organic in practice, but they will never call it that on a label. For Agustí and Jordi, honesty is not a certification — it is a relationship.

The winemaking philosophy of Los Comuns is one of radical humility and stubborn independence — a methodology born not from textbooks but from the daily reality of farming old vines on impossible slopes, in an old cooperative with no budget for glamour, and with a deep-seated belief that wine should be honest before it should be famous. Agustí and Jordi do not follow the Priorat playbook. They do not seek low yields through aggressive green harvesting. They do not extract for power. They do not age in new French oak. They do not add sulfites. They do not even accept the Priorat DOCa appellation, choosing instead the humble designation of Vino de la Mesa — table wine — as a deliberate act of defiance against a system they see as corrupted by commerce and reputation.

Each year, they carry out 25 to 35 micro-vinifications, each one representing a single parcel, a single harvest moment, or a single variety. The quantities are tiny — between 100kg and 1,000kg per vinification — which means that every decision is made by hand, by eye, and by intuition. Large parcels are harvested in multiple passes, with each pass vinified separately to capture the evolution of ripeness across the vineyard. The grapes are hand-harvested, transported to the old cooperative in Garcia, and fermented with indigenous yeasts in a mix of stainless steel, old oak barrels, and amphorae. There are no selected yeasts, no enzymes, no corrections, no filtration, and no clarification. The wines are what the grapes and the vintage made them — sometimes cloudy, sometimes wild, always true.

The reds are the heart of the portfolio. Estrem is made with carbonic maceration — a technique that produces bright, juicy, approachable wines even from the powerful grapes of Priorat. The result is a wine of indigo depth and surprising freshness, aged for just three months in amphora to preserve its immediacy. Bateta and Carinyós spend six months in old oak barrels — not new barriques, but tired, neutral casks that add texture without flavour, allowing the Llicorella minerality to speak without the mask of toast and vanilla. Patxanguero is 100% Garnatxa, a wine of solar generosity and Mediterranean warmth. Torts introduces Cabernet Sauvignon into the blend — a nod to the French varieties that were planted in Priorat during the 1980s renaissance, but handled here with a lightness that would shock the old guard.

The whites and sparkling wines push even further into the unknown. Erràtica Blanc is a skin-contact white — two months on the skins, extracting colour, texture, and phenolic complexity from white grapes grown on black slate. It is amber, grippy, and uncompromising — a wine that demands food and attention. Erràtica Ancestral is a sparkling wine made from Carinyena by the ancestral method — bottled during fermentation, capturing the wild energy of young yeast in a bottle of fine, natural bubbles. And their vin doux — a sweet wine — is a rare creature in the natural wine world, made without sulfites and without the heavy-handed sweetness of fortified wine, but with the gentle, honeyed residue of grapes that were allowed to hang until they surrendered their sugar to time. What unites them all is the Los Comuns signature: deeply rich, indigo-toned, intensely honest — wines that taste of slate, friendship, and the refusal to conform.

Los Comuns is not merely a winery; it is a manifesto written in slate and friendship — a project that has redefined what it means to make wine in one of the world's most prestigious regions by refusing to play by its rules. In an era when Priorat is synonymous with extraction, new oak, and astronomical prices, Agustí Perelló and Jordi Escoda have demonstrated that the most profound wines sometimes come from two friends working in an abandoned cooperative, making fewer than 3,500 bottles a year, and selling them as Vino de la Mesa. They have proven that Carinyena — often reduced to a blending grape in the south of France — can be a wine of singular, smoky intensity when grown on 85-year-old vines on pure Llicorella. That carbonic maceration — a technique associated with Beaujolais — can produce a Priorat of joy and immediacy. That a pét-nat of Carinyena — a sparkling red from one of the most tannic grapes in the world — can be a wine of exuberant charm. And that the refusal to certify, to appellation, or to conform is not a handicap but a liberation.

The legacy of Los Comuns is the legacy of the insider who chooses to be an outsider. Agustí and Jordi did not come to Priorat as seekers or investors; they were born here. They know every coster, every vein of quartz, every old vine that survived phylloxera and abandonment. Their choice to work without sulfites, without appellation, and without certification is not a marketing strategy — it is an act of fidelity to the land they grew up on and the friendship that binds them. The old cooperative in Garcia is not merely a building; it is a symbol — of continuity, of humility, of the belief that the best wine is made not in gleaming cellars but in spaces that smell of history. Their micro-vinifications are not merely a production method; they are a philosophy — the recognition that no two parcels are the same, and that blending them into a single, homogenous wine would be a betrayal of the terroir's voice.

The future of the project is tied to the future of natural wine as an act of local resistance — to the growing recognition that the greatest wines are not always made by those who seek global acclaim, but by those who stay: the childhood friends, the native sons, the quiet revolutionaries who see possibility in abandonment and truth in the refusal to scale. As Estrem continues to prove that Priorat can be bright and drinkable, as Bateta demonstrates that old-vine Carinyena can be both powerful and elegant, as Carinyós captures the dark soul of the slate, and as the Erràtica cuvées push the boundaries of what Priorat wine can be, Agustí and Jordi remain what they have always intended to be: two friends from Garcia who make wine the way their grandfathers would have recognised — by hand, by parcel, by instinct — always without sulfites, always without appellation, always without crap — one harvest, one micro-vinification, one honest bottle at a time.