Tarragona, A Tale of Two Distilleries
Chartreuse’s little known connection to Spain and how it gave rise to one of the most sought after collectibles among spirit enthusiasts
Reprinted from Distilled Issue 2
Words by Johanna Ngoh and photography by Gabriella Nonino
Chartreuse is to Tarragona as whisky is to Scotland, though it’s a decidedly younger love affair, commemorated every year during the festival of Santa Tecla, when rivers of yellow and green liqueur flow through the arteries of La Parta Alta, the old town contained within the Roman walls of an ancient city once known as Tarraco.
While tourists flock to Barcelona, the savvy traveller continues south to explore this bastion of Catalan culture, its relaxed urban vibe set against a stage of archaeological ruins, lively plazas, sandy beaches and delectable cuisine served with intense, full-bodied wines from the rocky hills of the nearby Priorat.
Civic pride is put on full display each September during Santa Tecla, a ten-day celebration of the region’s patron saint.
It’s a heady showcase of heritage and cultural tradition replete with parades, processions, fireworks, live music, dance, culinary events, street parties — and general revelry fuelled by Chartreuse.
Here the one-time ‘elixir of long life’ has become a celebration of life itself, and for many Chartreuse aficionados a visit to Tarragona during Santa Tecla is the ultimate pilgrimage.
It’s an alliance that dates back to 1878 when two Carthusian monks first visited the city to source quality eau-de-vie to use in distilling their famous liqueur. Tarragona was attractive with its proximity to vineyards and vital transportation links with its port and railway. It had the added appeal as an alternate base of operations, a contingency plan that took root as anticlerical tensions grew in France.
The Carthusians were no strangers to Catalunya – just forty kilometres from Tarragona was the site of the former Scala Dei monastery, an important branch of the Order from 1194 to 1835, and a key centre of their research into distillation. The monks came in search of August de Müller, a wine merchant originally from a dynasty of champagne producers in Reims.
The reputation of his wines was well known and his family tree went back to the same Marshal d’Estrée whose recipe forms the basis for Chartreuse. Bodegas de Müller became their principal supplier and as religious persecution in France escalated, the monks further cemented their ties to the city by converting an old textile factory to a distillery in 1882, in preparation for possible exile.
In 1903 the worst came to pass: the Carthusians were expelled from France and the government expropriated both their trademark and distillery in Fourvoirie, where they had been employing 300 people and producing three million litres of liqueur, most of it being sold in France, England, Russia and the United States.
While the military stood watch, the monks of La Grande Chartreuse departed by train for their charterhouse in Farneta, Italy, with a small contingent making their way to Tarragona to immediately resume production of Chartreuse under a new brand name, ‘Liqueur fabriquée à Tarragone par les Pères Chartreux’.
In Tarragona the textile factory had already been refurbished to serve as both a distillery and place of worship for the Order, in a most unusual juxtaposition of spirit and spiritual. Alembic stills, offices, warehousing, a pharmaceutical lab and a bottling hall sat cheek by jowl with monastic cells, a beautifully tiled chapel with detailed woodwork (regrettably destroyed by bombing during the Spanish Civil War), and a meditation garden that housed a statue of Mare Déu from their abandoned monastery at Scala Dei. A shop and tasting bar were eventually added in 1953 when the distillery was opened for tours.
For the people of Tarragona the arrival of the Carthusians is regarded as the dawn of the city’s economic and industrial heyday, with the distillery employing up to 200 workers at one time. “So many people worked at the distillery over the years, and Chartreuse was everywhere – gifted to friends and relatives for any and all occasions. It wasn’t Christmas if there wasn’t a bottle of Chartreuse on the table,” recalls Eduardo Seriol, a local pastry chef who has collected more than six hundred vintage bottles.
“Even now I am opening and drinking from my collection; when my son was born I celebrated with my oldest vintage from 1910. It’s like a grand cru wine – what’s the point in having these kind of bottles and not drinking them?” The liqueur became so embedded in ‘tarraconense’ life that locals still refer to it affectionately as their ‘oli’, its colour reminiscent of the olive oil that is a staple of the Spanish kitchen.
For the monks, Tarragona was a practical choice as a coastal city located near the French border with ready access to not just eau-de-vie, but to many of the required botanicals as well. The Carthusians established a warehouse and bottling facility in Marseilles to service the French market, with the rest of their distribution coordinated from Tarragona’s port. Casks sent to Marseilles were bottled with the label ‘Une Tarragone’ in an effort to frenchify a liqueur that was now being made in Spain.
As they competed with a government-sanctioned fake that used their trademarked name of ‘Chartreuse’, the monks retaliated with an aggressive advertising campaign announcing that the genuine article was now being made in Spain ‘using the same recipe and process which remains our secret’.
Bottles were redesigned with double labels indicating their new provenance and new name, and customers were urged to seek out true Chartreuse by asking for ‘Une Tarragone’, a nickname still used to this day among an older generation in the south of France.
The Carthusians returned from exile in 1932 to resuscitate their distillery in Fourvoirie, and operated both concurrently with the Tarragona outpost serving markets in Spain, Portugal and South America. Initially sixteen monks took up residence in Spain, but most did not have citizenship and they took leave in 1933 as anticlerical sentiments fomented during the Spanish Civil War. Four remained until 1940, after which time they returned to France, visiting annually from October to December to undertake a season of distillation and prepare the workers’ supplies for the following year.
Production slowed considerably in the seventies, and the Tarragona distillery was closed altogether in December 1988 after a failed attempt to stimulate business by diversifying production with the short-lived Chartreuse Anisette. Consumer tastes were changing and global sales could no longer justify two separate distilleries.
“People had stopped drinking it, both here and abroad,” explains Seriol. “‘Un chupito de Chartreuse’ with an espresso after dinner was once the norm, but it simply fell out of fashion, long before cocktails became a thing.”
It was a controversial decision that saddened residents but did not dampen the affection that the city continues to feel for the liqueur. Despite the distance in its production, Chartreuse continues to be regarded as a local product, so much so that each year 15,000 bottles are consumed over the ten days of Santa Tecla, most notably as part of ‘la mamadeta’, a slushy concoction of equal parts yellow and green Chartreuse mixed with lemon granita, filled into ubiquitous plastic cups worn around the neck of revellers attending Santa Tecla’s many festivities.
Since 2000 the Carthusians have reciprocated this affection by paying homage to their Catalan heritage with a limited number of bottles specially labelled to commemorate the festival. The yellow Santa Tecla edition is further bottled at a higher 43% abv to the delight of those longing for the time pre-1973 when it was always bottled at this higher strength.
On March 1, 1989 fourteen trucks filled with Chartreuse departed Tarragona to be repatriated to the monks’ cellars in Voiron, where their French distillery had been rebuilt in 1936. The sale of this dormant stock during the nineties not only highlighted the magic of vintage Chartreuse, but unveiled a stark contrast between the liqueurs being made at the two distilleries, igniting the collector’s market for older vintages, particularly those from Tarragona.
These liqueurs had clearly continued to mature in bottle, gaining a complexity that intensified certain flavours. This is most evident in yellow Chartreuse with its higher sugar content and lower percentage of alcohol, often compared to very old Sauternes that are said to ‘eat their sugars’, a translation of the French expression ‘manger ses sucres’, used to describe a wine that has evolved through a continued chemical interaction between the sugar and alcohol.
The end game is less sweetness but more depth, and a greater range of flavour, making vintage bottles of Chartreuse one of the most sought after collectibles among drinks enthusiasts.
‘Les Tarragones’ quickly became the shorthand for vintage bottlings of Chartreuse made in Tarragona, and they are now legendary amongst both aficionados and collectors, achieving astronomical prices in recent years. Cork-closed bottles from the fifties and sixties, in particular, are some of the most coveted, though equally notorious for slipping into the neck of the bottle.
“Without a doubt green Tarragonas from the 1960s with a cork were exceptional as were the yellow ones from the 1950s,” confirm Eduardo Seriol, “but that’s the problem too, so many of the corks have disintegrated and fallen right into the liqueur.”
Though the liqueurs made in the two distilleries used the same recipe, key differences arose making for markedly different products. Whereas in France the monks resumed distilling with eau-de-vie based on wines from the Languedoc, the Tarragona eau-de-vie was made from a blend of carignan and garnacha grapes from the Priorat.
The monks in Tarragona had also made slight adjustments to the production process, using plants sourced from its warmer surroundings, leading many to conclude that these botanicals were livelier and more concentrated in their essential oils.
Most notable, however, was the difference in maturation: in France the liqueurs were stored in underground, temperature-controlled cellars set to 12°C, while ageing tuns in Tarragona were placed in the distillery’s attic where temperatures varied between 3°C to 33°C depending on the time of year.
The result was a liqueur that most Chartreuse fans agree was more unctuous, more intense, more aromatic... and more moreish.
“I only deal in ‘Les Tarragones’,” says Sr Juncosa, an antique dealer in the old town who does a brisk turnover in vintage bottles of Chartreuse, though he is selective in what he sells to whom, preferring to keep his best finds for the collectors who come to Tarragona once or twice a year to see what dusties have turned up.
“They’ve given me good business over the years, usually coming from France, and always during Santa Tecla. Mostly collectors but also sommeliers who recognize the quality and provenance of ‘Les Tarragones’. They will often clear me out of everything I have in stock, listing them on their menus for upwards of ninety euros a shot. And being France, you know these are small pours.”
Given the recent surge in Chartreuse’s popularity, Sr Juncosa is wary of the many bottles that can be bought online, questioning both their price and provenance. “People are asking for stupid prices on eBay these days and you never know what you’re getting.”
“I only sell bottles when I can vouch for their provenance. When I visit a home to do an appraisal of any kind, the first thing I ask to see is the liquor cabinet and often there’s a dusty bottle or two at the back, usually an old yellow as the green is much stronger in alcohol and hence was not as popular. People here rarely know their value: it was a very common gift in the past and many people just put the bottles to one side.”
While these bottles have taken an almost mythic status among collectors, to the people of Tarragona they simply represent a nostalgia for its industrial past, and pride in a product that was made to the highest standards. Not only were many people employed by the distillery over the course of its 86-year tenure, but the name of this small yet proud city travelled far and wide, thanks to the bottles’ labels.
And it’s an affection that has only grown since the distillery closed. “Everything Chartreuse is wildly in demand – old posters, plastic ashtrays, shot glasses, even the keys to the distillery were reputedly sold to a collector,” says Eduard Seriol, showing off printing plates once used to label the bottles. “The monks took the liqueur but left pretty much everything else behind. Collectors, thieves, archaeologists – everyone looted and ransacked the distillery once it closed: even the clock on the tower was removed and some squatters quickly took up residence.”
It was a civic disgrace, with pressure on the municipality to properly honour Tarragona’s distilling heritage and Carthusian connection by converting the property to a museum. In 2013 the ageing warehouse, bottling hall and monastic cells were refurbished to house a language school, while the still rooms and production spaces were sealed off but remain intact, so hope springs eternal.
“The president of Chartreuse Diffusion comes to Santa Tecla from Voiron every year to attend a special dinner hosted by the mayor,” Eduard Seriol states. “And every year I tell them I have a garage full of memorabilia ready for a local museum. So my fingers are crossed that it’s just a matter of time – Chartreuse might be made in Voiron, but its passion lives here in Tarragona.”