While Montsant producers generally strive for the same styles of wine that are made in the Priorat, to my taste they don’t quite achieve the drama, intensity or distinctive minerality of the Priorat wines. Nonetheless, they are quite delicious in their own right. In the end, it’s not much of a stretch to liken them to Priorat’s, so long as it’s understood that the wines are related but not identical.

That leaves the matter of soul. What does Montsant offer without the burden of comparison? The wine panel tasted 20 bottles from recent vintages, primarily 2009s and 2010s, along with one each from ’06, ’07, ’08 and ’11. Florence Fabricant and I were joined by two guests, Hector Perez, wine director of Casa Mono near Gramercy Park, and Jill Roberts, wine director of the Marrow in the West Village.

We all appreciated the balance of the best wines, particularly since the leading grapes, garnacha and carignan, can easily veer off into the sweetly fruity realm if not managed carefully. Instead, we found a deep thematic strand binding many of the wines, comprising flavors of licorice, earth and minerals with the occasional herbal component. We were also surprised to find so few overtly oaky wines, often a hallmark of ambitious emerging regions.

“I was expecting much more alcohol, wood, jam and juice,” Jill said afterward. “I felt real craftsmanship.”

Let’s be clear: these wines are big, mostly 14 to 14.5 percent alcohol, but that feels natural in their context.

Craftsmanship was certainly evident in our top bottle, the 2010 Orto Vins, a seamlessly integrated wine that was mostly a blend of carignan and garnacha, with smaller amounts of tempranillo (known in Catalan as ull de llebre) and cabernet sauvignon, which has no Catalan alias, at least not yet. It was pure, harmonious, even elegant, and while I doubt it would be mistaken for a Priorat, it’s a wine on which Montsant could certainly hang its own identity.

It turns out that Orto’s viticulturalist, Joan Assens, worked for 15 years for Álvaro Palacios in Priorat before going his own way. He grows grapes biodynamically and, in addition to the lower-priced blend that we tried, makes four single-vineyard wines, which most definitely cost Priorat prices at $85 to $125 a bottle.