Bell-Serrai Garsed e Hijos
📍 Bellmunt del Priorat
Bell-Serrai Garsed e Hijos, S.L. is the legal name of a winery in Bellmunt del Priorat tied to one of the founding episodes of Priorat's modern era. The name comes from Adrian Garsed, an English wine trader who joined, around 1987, the small group of producers who in the mid-1980s set out to make highly concentrated wines in the region, following the lead of René Barbier, Álvaro Palacios, Carles Pastrana, Josep Lluís Pérez and Daphne Glorian.
The founding 1989 vintage is the best-known part of its story: it was actually a single wine, jointly made at Carles Pastrana's cellar, but bottled and sold under ten different labels, among them Clos Garsed, a Grenache-based red. While five of those projects — today's Clos Mogador, Clos de l'Obac, Clos Martinet, Clos Dofí and Clos Erasmus — went on to become benchmark Priorat estates, Clos Garsed was among the partners who did not continue beyond a vintage or two.
The company name still appears registered in Bellmunt del Priorat within DOQ Priorat, but no website or recent commercial activity has been found to confirm ongoing production; its interest today is mainly historical, as a record of one of the ten projects that, in 1989, put Priorat on the map for quality wine.
Imatge: joan ggk · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Sources: hudin.com · delectable.com · cheap-gourmet.blogspot.com