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For a long time, if you thought of Spanish wine, you might think of oaky, robust, inky Riojas and Ribera del Dueros or rich, monolithic Priorat maybe. These still exist, but a new wave of winemakers are crafting delicious wines in cooler parts of the country, using local grape varieties and taking their foot off the new oak pedal to create deliciously drinkable wines that taste of where they're from. As legendary Spanish wine writer Luis Gutierrez of Robert Parker Wine Advocate writes in his seminal book The New Vignerons:
"Their main aim in life is to portray the uniqueness of their vineyards, villages and landscapes through a bottle of wine.”
Ever since I first tasted a Merenzao from Ribeira Sacra 6 years ago, which turns out to be the same as the Jura variety Trousseau but planted in Galicia, I've been obsessed with the wines of Spain. It was so slatey and full of crunchy redcurrant and cherry fruit with a salty twist - so different from the heavily extracted reds I associated with Spain. It felt exciting to know that a swathe of young producers were trying to make wines that were markedly "different". Galicia is more climatically similar to Ireland than it is to, say, Malaga, with really strikingly beautiful, slate covered mountains and hills. So the wines produced there are much more "cool-climate" in style and have vibrant acidity,
Above: The steep, sloped slate terraces of Ribera Sacra in Galicia, home to some of the country's most thrilling red wines.
That combined with coastal vineyards like in Rias Baixas that produce wines with a salty, oceanic feel. It's not just northern Spain that's producing energetic, exciting wines though. Mountain regions can give you wines with beautiful freshness but with a real core of depth and power.
Be it Forcalla from Valencia, Garnacha from the Gredos Mountains or Godello from Bierzo, the local varieties in Spain you might not have heard of offer so much drinking pleasure and value for money - often having a similar flavour profile to counterparts in Burgundy, but for a fraction of the ever increasing price.
Rafael Cambra produces some of our favourite wines in the shop. High in the hills of Fontanars del Alforins in Valencia, some 700 metres above sea level, he's crafting deliciously distinctive Mediterranean wines at incredible value. Soplo Blanco and Tinto are his house wines, unbeatable in their quality to price ratio: a zesty, pure Malvasia and Viura blend, and a crunchy, fresh Garnacha and Forcalla. We also stock his fabulous single varietal Forcalla - a lesser-spotted local variety that produces red wines with naturally high acidity, low alcohol, and a light colour, beautifully pure and floral and perfect served lightly chilled with BBQ food.
Cesar Marquez farms in Bierzo, in Castilla Y Leon, a little further inland from Galicia in northern Spain. Cesar is the nephew of Bierzo's most famous winemaker, Raul Perez, who has brought the region to prominence in the last 20 years. Cesar makes the excellent Castro Ventosa wines at his family winery, but he also has is own project, where he's making a lighter, fresher, more delicate style of wine, using a little less oak and working with more whole clusters and often from vineyards at real altitude.
Bierzo is a region that's best known for its reds, namely Mencia, but Cesar's Godello is a triumph. There's more than a touch of Burgundy about this wine, with beautiful flinty, struck-match and mineral edges to the core of citrus and almost pineapple-y fruit, bags of acidity and just a kiss of nutty oak. This is serious value for money, with depth and intensity that suggest plenty of aging potential, but it's ready to get stuck in to now.
Over to Mentrida, a small village in the Gredos mountains near Madrid, which has become an ultra-trendy hotbed of high quality Garnacha or Grenache. It's a steep, rugged, high-altitude region with granite soils and very old bush vines, components that can produce seriously delicious, complex wines. This wine drinks like a mini Gredos with a dash more freshness and acidity that gives it beautiful lift. Pale red with lifted cherry, pomegranate and watermelon fruit, balanced with silky tannins - a beautiful wine that works really well with a bit of a chill. This has BBQ fodder written all over it.
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