Christmas is over, but here in Spain, the holidays are just kicking off!  We still have two more weeks of festivities here!

Many people here in Spain dismiss whites for the holidays, relegating them to the hot days of summer, but actually whites can be the perfect pick for holiday meals.  The best whites for matching with a wide variety of holiday foods are not  oaky Chardonnays or even an intense, green Sauvignon Blancs.  For me the best whites are un-oaked (or little oaked) aromatic varieties such as Riesling or Albariño. 

Another group of unique and hedonistic holiday wines are dessert wines…they are a perfect ending to a long meal and often can match well with certain holiday dishes, such as foie or cheese.  Dessert wines are under-appreciated and often misunderstood…even by wine lovers.  The dessert wines I serve to my classes often cause surprise…many clients have never tried high quality sweet wines and they are often astonished by what they taste. There are so many types…but today I would like to recommend three:

 One at the best whites in Spain at an amazing price…see my previous article on the changing face of Spanish white wine. 

Wine:  As Sortes
Winery:  Rafael Palacios S.L.
Vintage: 2005
Denominacion de Origen (DO): Valdeorras
Alc: 14% (!)
Grape variety: 100% Godello
Additional factoids:  40-60 year old vines, vines all over 600 meters, micro-oxygenation techniques used
Oak regime:  fermentation and aging in large oak foudres, aged 6-8 months over lees
Price:  20-25 euros in Spain

In my classes, I always stress the huge gap that exists between Spanish red wines and white wines. For several years, I’ve been able to use a fun example to illustrate that point.  The most expensive red wine in Spain is Pingus from Ribera del Duero, which has a theoretical price of 600 euros, but in reality is seems to be much higher. Until recently. the most expensive still white wine in Spain was Chivite Coleccion 125 Barrel-fermented Chardonnay from Navarra at only about 50 euros!   I would venture to say no other country had such a disparity between the colors!

The Denominacion de Origen (DO) Manchuela, or wine appellation, is located in eastern La Mancha, close to the beautiful town of Cuenca.  This is one of the newest DOs in Spain, formed from the natural break-up of huge La Mancha into more coherent appellations.  Much of the production is still mediocre, but there are more interesting wines being made these days. 
One of the pioneers in the area is Finca Sandoval, a winery which makes consistently excellent wines in a challengingly hot climate. The winery was founded in 1998 and is the personal project of a well known Spanish wine critic, Victor de la Serna.  There search for quality includes traditional open-top fermentation vats with manual punch down…the wines are neither fined nor filtered.  Most of the grapes are local:  Bobal, Monastrell, and Garnacha, but they also have some great Syrah, using clones from Chateauneuf-du-Pape.  There are only two wines:  Salia is a great entry-level option at only about 12 euros. See below for my comments on their top wine:  Finca Sandoval. 

This is a subject that I can’t avoid….Rioja and its various styles…I love it! I’ve had a few comments saying that I’ve been unfair to classic Rioja and perhaps I have. Some have said that long barrel aging does not kill fruit flavors, but enhances them…this I have to disagree with. Classic Riojas are not fruit-driven wines…they have many characteristics that make them attractive but the fruit is often oxidized and faded. The bottom line for me is that I appreciate all the various styles that Rioja has to offer today, but I think it is a disservice to the consumer that you have no idea of what style you might get…especially at the reserva level….maybe style should be indicated on the label. I think having so many styles that are not indicated on the label is also a disservice to Rioja as well…it’s hard to project a coherent wine image.

As mentioned in my article below on Navarra Wine Country, we recently had the chance to visit an impressive new winery project near Estella in Navarra: Pago de Larrainzar.

The project is the vision of Miguel Canalejo Larrainzar, the former president of Alcatel in Spain. It is a real family project: a couple of his children are involved full-time in the winery.

At the winery, we got to taste the whole range of wines, all from 2003. These are some of Spain top-rated wines…for more information on the winery, see the article below.

These are really impressive wines! With careful and high tech viticulture this winery is able to produce balanced wines in an extremely hot area of Spain. The problem in hot weather is that by the time the tannins are ripe the fruit is over-ripe and the acid levels are quite low. These wine all retained a freshness, despite being big intense wines. An outstanding series of wines!

We just visited The Dominio de Valdepusa Winery in Toledo Province and were really impressed! The vineyards is where the focus is…these are some of the most high tech vineyards I ever seen! They have sensors that detect every miniscule movement and change in the vine….years of analysing this data allows them to know with precision the exact water needs of their vines. They believed that it is very difficult to get good phenolic ripeness without over-ripe fruit and too low acid levels in hot viticultural areas. Their careful use of technology actually allows them to get a perfectly ripe grapes with good acid levels…this gives top quality, intense, yet fresh wines that age well.

This is a great example of some of the great value, high quality wines coming out of La Mancha at the moment. Ezekiel Sánchez-Mateos, owner of the great little wine store, Reserva y Cata, makes this wine. He has a wonderful personalized selection of wines in his store and on the days he is there, he can guide you really well, and he can also help you in English! Ezekiel runs one of the few stores in town, where each wine is individually selected with care. Check out the website at: http://www.reservaycata.com/

Calle Santiago, 9
Hours: from 1300-1600 and 2030 to 0000, closed on Mondays
Tel: 91 542 2160

Confusing title perhaps, but I want to give tasting notes on one of my favourite Bierzo wines in very different vintages and also describe how that same wine is being altered for export to the US.

Bierzo is producing many outstanding red wines from the excellent indigenous grape Mencía. The region is very hot…producers from all over Spain are buying vineyards there. The top end wines are winning recognition from national and international wine critics. The prices, though still reasonable, are rising quickly. There are still a few great bargains…one of them is Cepas Viejas from the winery Dominio de Tares.

I’ve been tasting so many great wines…it’s been hard to keep up! Today I wanted to talk a little about some unconventional Spanish wines that fall into 2 categories: Vino de la Tierra and Vino de Mesa. In theory these two categories are not quality wines and should be inexpensive, lower quality wines….but in reality, there are some very premium wines being made under both categories!

Somewhat of a sensational title…but there are many Riojas I just don’t get!

1. Traditional Riojas: Long oak aging in older barrels, higher acidity, lower alcohol.

I can appreciate the last two, but the first one just kills all the fruit in the wine. The type of wood notes it gives are both overwhelming and unpleasant. The best ones can be attractive in an elegant, mellow sort of way. Most are just thin and unpleasant.

Lately I tasted one of the most popular Riojas in the world: Marques de Caceres Crianza 2003.

We just joined a new wine tasting group and Monday, we went to our first dinner. This group has a fun format: once a month dinner with a chosen wine theme. Each person brings a bottle and they are served blind to the group. We vote at the end on the best wines and then they are unveiled. The owner of the winning bottle doesn’t have to pay for his dinner! Great motivation!

This iteration, the theme was Ribera del Duero and Aragon. I knew everyone was likely to bring Ribera, so one of our bottles was from DO Campo de Borja in Aragon.

Lots of tastings this week…so hopefully I’ll get a few interesting posts up!
This was a very interesting and original wine I tried last week. Prieto Picudo is a little known indigenous variety from Leon that is becoming fashionable among winemakers. It is not allowed in Denominacion de Origen (DO) Wines, but is sometimes blended with the more well-known Mencía in lower category wines. I’ve only tried it twice so far, but both wines had a lot of similarities in aromas and flavors. The grape certainly has a very strong and unique aromatic profile. Some winemakers consider it the next, great grape of Spain…the two I’ve tried, though extremely interesting, have not completely convinced me of that.

We usually bring the wine when we go to Miguel’s family’s house. This time we brought a Gran Elias Mora, a blockbuster wine from Toro. While it was aerating in the decanter, Uncle Constancio offered up an older Rioja. We cleaned out a bunch of old Riojas at Christmas…most of them were way gone…so naturally I was a little dubious.
However this wine is a top end single-vineyard wine from a bodega I know well. It’s also from 1996, not as old at the over-the-hill 92s I was drinking over the holidays.
A pet peeve of mine is that people often keep their wines too long…it seems the word reserve on the label encourages it. The beauty of the traditional reserva system in Spain is that the winery doesn’t release the wine for many years. It is already ready to drink upon release…yes you can keep a reserve for many more years….but it is only the absolute top wines that are drinking well ten years on.
This wine was still drinking well ten years on! It was fading a little, but still ahd lots of elegant, delicate fruit left. It was a pleasant surprise….

I gave an interesting tasting on Saturday contrasting crianza and reserva wines. It ended up being a tasting less about the primary theme and more about Spanish wine palates today. The 16 clients were overwhelmingly Spanish, though there was one British girl.

Spanish wine rules 101: Crianza wines must be aged 24 months before they are released, six of which must be in oak. Reserva wines must be held 36 months, 12 of which must be in oak. These are minimums…often the oak portion is much more significant…some Denominations require more.

This winery, Finca La Estacada, has often impressed me with their extremely inexpensive, easy drinking wines. The winery is in La Mancha, but is not in the Denominacion de Origen (DO) area and therefore makes wine under Vino de La Tierra (VdT) de Castilla. The category of VdT is quite trendy at the moment and excellent wines are made under it, especially in Castilla Leon and Castilla La Mancha. Under European law, therefore Spanish law, Vdt is not considered quality wine, but rather falls under table wine. It is equivalent to Vin Pays under the French system. VdT guarantees origin but the wines are subject to much less restrictive regulations with regards to yields, aging, and grape variety etc. VdT is being used by wineries outside the officially designated DO areas, but also by winemakers who want more flexibility in making their wines.

Before Xmas, we visited the wine region of Toro, NW of Madrid. This is a region that is famous for its potent red wines made from Tinta de Toro, a local variety of Tempranillo. The region has seen a lot of change over the last 5 years…the quality of the wines has improved dramatically, as have the prices! It can still represent good value, especially compared to its neighbour to the east Ribera del Duero! I hope to do a more in depth trip report to post at a later date.

My husband’s family loves a good dessert wine…so we break one out as often as possible. Often they are not Spanish ones, as the Spanish dessert wine scene can be limiting, but today we had one of our favourite sweet sherries. Pedro Ximenez (PX) is the typical sweet sherry that you see over here. PX is the sweetening grape made after drying the grapes in the sun. The monovarietal wine is thick, syrupy and intensely sweet, especially after long aging. It can be quirt nice but many of them are very cloying. One sip suffices…or it can be used over vanilla ice cream.

Ribera del Duero produces some of Spain stop red wines, but at a price. By Spanish standard, the region is one of the most expensive. I’m always looking out for a wine that represents quality for price…fairly tricky!

This wine is quite good value:

Wine: Montecastro 2004

Winery: Bodegas y Viñedos Montecastro
Denominacion de Origen (DO): Ribera del Duero
Alc: 14.5%
Grape variety: 100% Tinto Fino (local variety of Tempranillo)
Oak regime: 18 months in oak (50% 1st year, 50% 2nd year)
70% French, 25% American, 5% Lithuanian
Price: Around 12 euros in SpainI tasted the 2003 of this wine a few weeks ago and found it a little flat in terms of over-ripe fruit and an excess of tannins. The 2004 much better (in line with the better vintage)…it has just been released, so look for it.