Spain Continues to Reveal New and Remarkable Wine Regions

The rain in Spain may fall mainly on the plain, but the wine in Spain grows just about everywhere. However, not many people know this. Most can name a bunch of wines from France and at least a few from Italy. But from Spain? Rarely can people think of one beyond Rioja, even though Spain is fourth on the list of the world’s top wine producers (behind Italy, France and the United States). Lately, however, Spain has received a lot of attention from the media, retailers, sommeliers and, well, just about everyone. That’s because, like a poker player slaps aces on the table, the country keeps revealing new and remarkable wine regions, one after another. Its good hand was held close to the vest, though, as Spain, long considered a wasteland of wine, has proven to be a wine wonderland. How do you explain the shift? As in many places in Europe, Spain has thousands of years of history producing wine, but most of it was not good or at least not up to modern standards. With the arrival only in the last decade or so of modern winemaking technology to some of the smaller, remote wine regions, good wine became possible. Concurrently hitting the scene was the first generation of Spanish winemakers to study at schools in places like Bordeaux, Burgundy, the United States and so on. As they began their peregrinations across the country, these educated enologists found much to their liking – old, abandoned vineyards that just needed some TLC and new areas ripe for the planting. What does this collision of old and new equal? That’s right: good wine and lots of it. To be recognized internationally, these newer regions – and I’ll name them here in a bit – needed breakout wines. That is, wines that seem to come from nowhere to achieve great critical admiration. Every emerging region needs one or two of these to put them on the map, as a breakout wine ultimately helps all the producers from the region, whether they sell their wares for $6 or $160. Usually it’s the wines that go for the latter price that grab the world’s attention and bring importers and winemakers, who comb the hillsides and valleys, looking for the next big thing. When one breakout wine proves that a region can make world-class juice, like a gold rush, the multitudes flocks to get in on the act. And ultimately, everyone’s a winner. This is precisely what happened with Priorat, a once-sleepy area to the south and west of Barcelona. A happening region a century ago for the production of dark, alcoholic, bulk wine that was typically blended into the wines of other regions and countries for color and stoutness, Priorat had been forgotten and slipped into dormancy. When a few trained winemakers with good taste, such as Alvaro Palacios and René Barbier, discovered there were abandoned, low-yielding, gnarled old vines of Carignane and Grenache growing out of schist-covered hillsides, they knew they had something. Some viticultural touchups, French oak barrels and a couple of years later Palacios’ wine L’Hermita and Barbier’s Clos Mogador (as well as a couple of others) blew the socks off of Robert Parker and Parker-types around the world. Nowadays you can still get those top wines for a hundred dollars a bottle or so. But, more importantly, you can also get inexpensive Priorat wine for ten bucks at the grocery store. The region is on the map. Likewise, the region of Galicia on Spain’s western Atlantic coast came out of nowhere to put the previously obscure Albarino grape on everyone’s lips, tongues and gullets. Not a monolithic red that can fetch high prices like the Priorat wines, Albarino is a crisp, zesty white that goes well with fresh fish. But the press got ahold of it as something refreshing, different and cheap, and suddenly a new wine region was born. Who even knew Spain produced white wine? Now, lots of restaurants have food-friendly Galician Albarino on their bulging wine lists. So what’s next? There’s a region called Toro which, like the Priorat, is gifted with old vines and underutilized history. Already, some crafty winemakers are exploiting those very things to bring us Numanthia and Termanthia, a couple of huge (and hugely expensive), old-vine Tempranillos that speak to Spain’s best-known ability: producing giant, dry red wines. Soon, though, there should be a flood of smaller, more manageable reds from the region. Same with an enormous region in Spain’s interior. Heard of the Man from La Mancha? Get ready for the wine from La Mancha. We might call this sere, hot, inland plain an impossible dream. The Spanish call it the sleeping giant. That’s because miles and miles of vineyards are being planted there, which the Spanish see as able to produce liters and liters of decent wine. It’s coming to a grocery store near you. Without mentioning other upcoming regions like Bierzo, Rueda, Valladolid and Calatayud, we covered a lot of territory. So get ready for Spain. Lots of new grapes to learn about, lots of new wines. Lots to drink.