Elizabeth Hecker’s Ethos Priorat is a labor of love filled with evocative words and pictures, says David Williams.
The idea that a wine can have a sense of place is, if not entirely uncontroversial, certainly widely accepted in contemporary wine circles. Quite how literally we should take this notion, however, is another matter entirely. The more skeptical among us might ask just what kind of information we are being given about place when we taste: Can a wine be said to describe a place in the same way as a piece of descriptive prose or poetry, a painting, or a photograph? Is wine’s evocative power confined to reminding us of places we already know, or can it take us somewhere we’ve never been before?
For Elizabeth Hecker, there’s no doubt that some wines, from some places, can indeed communicate something vividly precise about their origins. Recalling the source inspiration for Ethos Priorat in the book’s opening pages, she looks back two decades to her first taste of wine from the Catalan region that would go on to become her great obsession.
“My awareness began in 2003, when I tasted a Priorat wine at a festival in Telluride, Colorado,” Hecker writes. “I had not heard of the region, so I had no preconceived notions, but when I brought the glass to my nose, my first impression was not about an aroma or flavor. It was as if my palate had eyes. I was looking into mysterious darkness that opened
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
