Terra Alta is the highest and most remote corner of the province of Tarragona, a plateau at 350 to 500 metres between the Ebro and the Aragonese border, surrounded by the Ports and Pàndols ranges. It is a landscape of olive and almond groves, dry stone huts and villages that have been losing population for a century, and it has had appellation status since 1982.

The region holds the largest planting of Garnacha Blanca in the world, around a third of the global total, and that is what it is known for: a full bodied, low acid white with notes of fennel and ripe pear that ages better than its reputation suggests. Garnacha Peluda, the hairy leaved mutation, and old Garnacha and Cariñena make the reds. The traditional sweet wine, vi ranci, is aged in glass demijohns left outside in the sun. Gandesa, the main town, has a modernist cooperative cellar built by Cèsar Martinell in 1919.