I.
Vintage MMXXIII18,000 bottles
Joven
€42Cuvée
60% Garnatxa · 30% Carinyena · 10% Syrah
Tasting
Bright morello cherry, crushed thyme, wet slate. Drink young — a portrait of the soil before time softens it.
6 months · French oak
DO Priorat · Single Estate · Vintage MMXXIV
Terra Negra
Old vines. Black soil.
41°08′N · 0°49′EFalset · Tarragona · ESLicorella · Llicorella
Three labels · One estate
The Wines
A trilogy poured from the same hillside. Each wine a different patience, a different listening.
II.
Vintage MMXX9,000 bottles
Reserva
€120Cuvée
70% Carinyena · 25% Garnatxa · 5% Syrah
Tasting
Black plum, graphite, dried rosemary, smoked iron. The middle voice of the estate — patience without austerity.
18 months · French oak, 30% new
III.
Vintage MMXVI3,000 bottles
Gran Reserva
€380Cuvée
100% Carinyena · 80-year-old vines
Tasting
Black truffle, cured tobacco, violet, licorella minerality. A single parcel. A single voice. Cellar twenty years.
36 months · French oak, 60% new
Fifteen harvests · One hillside
The Vintage Record
Each year writes itself onto the same slate. Scroll back through fifteen harvests at Terra Negra — what the sky gave us, what the soil remembered.
The Current Release
2024
Score98
A vintage of restraint.
Cool spring, slow-warming summer. Long hang time gave us perfume without weight. The Carignan sang the loudest.
Yield · 18 hl/haRain · 412 mmHarvest · Sep 22 — Oct 14
2023
Score95
Drought made it serious.
The driest year on the estate in a decade. Small berries, thick skins, profound concentration. Built to outlive us.
Yield · 14 hl/haRain · 287 mmHarvest · Sep 18 — Oct 6
2022
Score96
Classic Priorat structure.
Hot August broke into cool September nights. Acidity locked the fruit into place. A wine that needs five years to whisper.
Yield · 20 hl/haRain · 356 mmHarvest · Sep 25 — Oct 18
2021
Score94
Quiet, precise, true.
Nothing dramatic. A textbook season — and texts written this well are rare. Pure expression of the licorella.
Yield · 22 hl/haRain · 428 mmHarvest · Sep 28 — Oct 16
Reserva — Current Release
2020
Score97
The wind year.
A tramontana week in August cut yields by a third. What remained was salt-edged, dark, structured. A vintage to keep.
Yield · 15 hl/haRain · 318 mmHarvest · Sep 20 — Oct 9
2019
Score93
Generous and round.
Warm, even, kind. The wines came out plush, almost southern. We held them longer in barrel to ground the fruit.
Yield · 26 hl/haRain · 445 mmHarvest · Sep 16 — Oct 4
2018
Score92
A rainy autumn tested patience.
Picking was a chess game. We waited through three storms. The wines reward the gamble — fresh, tense, very alive.
Yield · 24 hl/haRain · 512 mmHarvest · Oct 2 — Oct 24
2017
Score96
Heat and discipline.
The hottest summer on record at the estate. We harvested at night. The Carignan held its acid like a vow.
Yield · 16 hl/haRain · 294 mmHarvest · Sep 8 — Sep 28
Gran Reserva — Current Release
2016
Score99
The reference vintage.
Every variable aligned. Old Carignan that yielded almost nothing — three bunches per vine — yielded everything. A legend.
Yield · 12 hl/haRain · 362 mmHarvest · Sep 22 — Oct 12
2015
Score94
Plush and sun-warmed.
A friendly year. The wines opened early and stayed open. Fewer questions, more pleasure — not a small virtue.
Yield · 25 hl/haRain · 390 mmHarvest · Sep 14 — Oct 2
2014
Score90
A humbler chapter.
Cool, damp. We declassified more than we kept. The Joven from this year remains a quiet study in restraint.
Yield · 28 hl/haRain · 528 mmHarvest · Oct 4 — Oct 26
2013
Score93
The wind returned.
Late summer mistral concentrated the fruit. Wines tightly wound — opening only now, after a decade in bottle.
Yield · 19 hl/haRain · 342 mmHarvest · Sep 26 — Oct 14
2012
Score95
Stone and bramble.
A dry, late vintage with night-time harvest. The wines carry the cool of the slate even on a warm afternoon.
Yield · 17 hl/haRain · 308 mmHarvest · Sep 28 — Oct 18
2011
Score91
Pretty and aromatic.
A floral, lifted year. Less brooding than usual — a softer Priorat. The 80-year vines gave us their gentler face.
Yield · 23 hl/haRain · 402 mmHarvest · Sep 18 — Oct 6
Library
2010
Score97
The vintage that proved us.
Our second decade began here. Dense, mineral, with a long finish that still surprises us at every tasting.
Yield · 16 hl/haRain · 330 mmHarvest · Sep 24 — Oct 14
Two generations · One soil
The Estate
The vines were planted by Joan Vidal-Soler in 1944, on twelve hectares of black slate above the village of Falset.
Eighty harvests later, those Carignan stocks still produce — barely. Three bunches per vine. Berries the size of wild peas, skins thick as parchment. We do not irrigate. We do not fertilize. We farm by the moon, prune by hand, harvest by lantern.
In 2002, the second generation — Anna and Marc Vidal — converted the estate to biodynamic practice. They planted no new acreage and added no equipment that would not have existed in their grandfather's cellar. The wine, they decided, would be made by the place, not by them.
Today, Terra Negra produces thirty thousand bottles each vintage. Half are allocated to private cellars. The rest go to the restaurants and merchants who have stood with us since the beginning.
Founded
1944
Hectares
12
Oldest vines
80 years
Annual production
30,000 bottles
Soil
Licorella slate
Farming
Biodynamic, dry
Anna & Marc Vidal — Vignerons
Parcel La ForadadaCarinyena · 1944
The cellar · Falset
From vine to bottle
Vinification
Four movements. No shortcut between any of them.
I.
Harvest
By hand. By lantern. By touch.
We pick before the sun warms the slate, in 12-kilogram crates. Bunch by bunch, two sortings before the cellar door — once in the row, once at the press.
II.
Crush
Gentle. Whole-cluster, then foot-trodden.
Carignan goes in whole-bunch for perfume and tension. Garnatxa is foot-trodden in stone lagares — a method our grandfather used, returned to us by patience.
III.
Aging
Old wood. Long silence.
Joven rests six months in seasoned French oak. Reserva, eighteen. The Gran Reserva passes three years in barrel, then waits another two in bottle before it ever sees a hand outside ours.
IV.
Bottling
By moon phase, never filtered.
We bottle by the descending moon, unfiltered, unfined, with minimal sulfur. Every cork is hand-stamped. Every label is signed by the vigneron of that vintage.
What is written about us
Press
Wine Spectator
97
“A landmark Priorat — taut, mineral, profoundly site-driven. The 2016 Gran Reserva is a generational wine.”
Decanter
98
“Terra Negra continues to set the reference for old-vine Carignan. Few wines anywhere combine this much density with this much refinement.”
Robert Parker
99
“An exceptional address. The 2020 Reserva is one of the finest expressions of licorella terroir I have tasted this decade.”
Jancis Robinson
19+
“Quiet, disciplined, achingly precise. Anna and Marc Vidal have not so much made a wine as remembered one.”
By appointment only
Visit
We host twelve guests a week. No more.
Tastings begin in the cellar and end on the terrace above the slate amphitheater of La Foradada — usually with the sun on the far side of the Montsant.
Children are welcome at lunch. Phones, only for photographs of the view.
Mas Vidal · Camí de la Vinya s/n
43730 Falset · Tarragona · Spain
visit@terranegra.es · +34 977 830 042
Private cellar list
Allocations
Half of every vintage is reserved for the cellar list — a private register of three hundred names, kept since 1962.
Allocations are offered each spring, by handwritten letter. The list moves slowly — usually one or two new members per year. Add your name below; we write back to everyone, in the order in which we hear from them.
No marketing. No newsletter. Only the spring letter.