In 2000 when Eben Sadie and Dominik Huber first met at Mas Martinet, Eben was a promising and highly-regarded young enologist from South Africa and Dominik, a native German, was a wine enthusiast with a background in business administration and an interest in the culinary arts. In short order they became fast friends.
With the help of the Perez family of Mas Martinet, Eben and Dominik purchased some fruit and leased a little corner in the cellar of Cims de Porrera where they vinified their first vintage of Dits del Terra in 2001. After two years at Cims de Porrera they moved into a tiny cellar in Torroja del Priorat. The move coincided with the first vintage of Arbossar in 2003. In the following years they released additional cuvees: Torroja in 2005, Manyes and Tosses in 2006, Pedra de Guix in 2008 and Terra de Cuques in 2011. Throughout the decade since its founding, Terroir al Limit has evolved in its understanding of the Priorat – coming to view it as a region similar to Burgundy in its complexity and potential to produce elegant and transparent wines. The Torroja and Terra de Cuques are the village wines, Pedra de Guix, Dits del Terra and Arbossar the Premier Crus, and Manyes and Tosses are the Grand Crus.
With the demands arising from increased production and additional farming responsibilities and with Eben Sadie spending more time in South Africa with his various projects, Domink began working full time at Terroir al Limit in 2007. Devoting himself primarily to the cultivation of a growing number of vineyard sites, Dominik approach to farming directly impacted the quality of the fruit at harvest. With better fruit coming into the cellar, Eben and Dominik had a profound realization that ripe, concentrated grapes combined with extractive winemaking and aging in barriques didn’t really show the authenticity of the vineyards they were working. As a result they begun a process of reevaluation resulting in earlier harvests, phasing out the use 225 liter barrels and employing a “Burgundian” style of vinification utilizing whole clusters and avoiding either pigeage or remontage. The goal at Terroir al Limit is the fostering of wines of infusion rather than extraction, and elegance rather than the typical heaviness of the Priorat. Currently the wines are aged in foudres– Stockinger upright barrels from Austria to be exact– between 1,200 and 3,500 liters in size or in small concrete tanks.
