Cellars de Scala Dei – El Tribut 2024 Review

TLDR

This Scala Dei premium red wine from the Priorat Region of Spain certainly lives up to the prestigious D.O.Q. A blend of Garnacha, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon come together to make a wine that is best described by the phrase uttered by my mother after her first sip,

“this is a very drunk making wine!”.

Appearance

In the glass, this wine is an intense, deep garnet red heading into a raisin purple. When swirled in the glass, I was quite amazed by a thick, syrupy rim of legs that lasted for an incredibly long time, not that surprising considering its rather tasty 14% ABV.

Aroma

The aroma of Tribut is powerful; I was practically slapped in the face with a mix of super ripe blackberry and dark cherry while filling up my glass. A closer whiff then added notes of dried tobacco, dark chocolate, and black pepper. But the overriding thought that came to mind was a dark berry conserve, one of those fancy jams available in rich people supermarkets, the one that you buy once to fool yourself you’ve grown up and forget about until you toss it out 3 years later.

• Blackberry

• Bing Cherry

• Blackcurrant conserve

• Dried tobacco

• Dark Chocolate

• Black Pepper

Taste

This wine is a marvel on the palate. The first thing I noticed was the silky-smooth mouthfeel that disguises its hefty alcoholic content. Truly, this is one of those wines that you have a few too many glasses of, indulging in its rich flavours and how easy it is to drink, only to stand up and realize the room wasn’t spinning this much 5 glasses ago. Paired with its smooth tannins and balanced acidity are flavours of ripe and dried black fruits, dry minerals, and spices.

• Blackberry

• Plum

• Raisin

• Smoke

• Vanilla

• Slate

Food Pairing

The number one piece of advice when pairing wine with food is to match intensity; strong wines need strong foods. El Tribut is a great example of this rule. Its rich flavours, dark fruits, and persistent finish make the wine a fine pairing to hearty meat dishes and strong cheeses.

• Those rich fruity flavours would pair nicely with stronger, aged cheeses and charcuterie.

• What grows together goes together, a nicely aged Manchego will work well.

  • Aged Gouda with its caramelized, nutty notes will pair nicely with Tribut’s full bodied dark fruits.

• A touch of smoke from that oak aging makes me think of BBQ.

  • A bit of smoked brisket with cornbread and BBQ pit beans, what a pairing.

  • In Worcester we have a Hickory’s Smokehouse that does this exact meal and boy am I craving one of these whilst writing this post!

Wine Smeller Thoughts

God I love learning about wine!

It's not just the drinking part that fascinates me, although that is a fantastic upside to my hobby and career. Sometimes researching a wine will lead me down a rabbit hole of history and cultural education. What was meant to be a 15-minute wine brush-up can become an entire day of sitting at the computer, learning about the Ecclesiastical confiscations of Mendizábal of the 1830s and how it inadvertently led to a Spanish wine revival over 100 years later.

Scala Dei’s history was one of those moments. I began with just wanting to learn a little bit about the vinification of this specific wine and ended up learning about a twelfth century Carthusian Monastery that became a major player in the Spanish Renaissance. The name itself, ‘Scala Dei,’ comes from a legend that traveling Carthusian monks came across a shepherd who was gifted a vision of angels ascending a ‘Stairway to Heaven’ from the nearby summit of Mount Montsant. If you ask me, building an entire monastery on the account of a man who fell asleep and had a dream is a little extreme, but hey, apparently it worked out for them.

Whatever the truth behind its foundations, I now desperately want to visit the vineyard and see this amazing historic site for myself, experience the culture, and of course, try the wine in that amazing Spanish sun.