Spanish wines

As good as it can be and however much you love it, there’s more to the Spanish wine scene than Rioja, argues wannabe Spaniard Adam Lechmere

It’s my theory that every northern European male secretly wishes he were Spanish. There’s something life-affirming about Spain. It’s the verve, la marcha as they call it. In wine terms, that often means, ‘we all love Rioja’. And there’s nothing wrong with that: Rioja makes great wines: elegant, food-friendly, and affordable at one end of the spectrum, ageworthy and magnificent at the other.

Of course there are regions of Spain almost as well known as Rioja: Priorat in the north-east, Toro and Ribera del Duero to the west of Rioja. Every supermarket carries the wines produced by Torres, a huge presence in Penedès, south of Barcelona.

But Spain is a vast and thirsty country with a fabulous variety of wine that is only just finding a market in the UK. ‘It’s frustrating,’ says Spanish specialist Daniel Illsley of Theatre of Wine. ‘There have been so many signs of Spain emerging from the Rioja bubble, then it disappears.’

That may be changing. Spain’s trump cards are its ancient tradition of winemaking and its range of climates, from the cooler north-west to the baked south, the mountainous north-east and the desert-like Extremadura. I’ll bet, unless you’ve holidayed there, you probably won’t have had anything recently from Ribeiro, Mallorca, Campo de Borja, La Mancha or Bierzo. All these appellations are producing good wines that, with a little effort, you can find in the high street.

The north-west of Spain has an almost Celtic maritime climate – hot summers and cool, rainy autumns – perfectly placed to make wonderfully fresh reds and zippy whites. Take one of its appellations: Bierzo, in the province of Castilla y León on the borders of Galicia. Aficionados have long praised its powerful, aromatic reds from a local grape called mencia. These wines are remarkable for freshness allied with powerful fruit flavours and juicy tannins.

I’ve written before about altitude and its beneficial effects. Last year I visited Empordà, high in Spain’s north-eastern corner in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here is a concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants – it’s where chef-boffin Ferran Adría set up El Bulli – and a clutch of hillside winemakers working wonders with garnacha and carignan.

And that’s just trendy Catalonia. The vast arid central plain of La Mancha is the home of the most widely planted grape in the world, the white airén. The co-operatives of La Mancha supply a third of Spain’s domestic needs, and traditionally the baked earth has produced flabby, alcoholic wines with no acid or backbone. However, as with the rest of Spain, quality is improving. Now they’re making wines like the Vuvuzela (below), a superbly quaffable red.

La Mancha aside, at the moment it’s the north that holds all the cards – you’ll have to search hard to find anything from Andalucia, Valencia, Mallorca or Extremadura. But keep looking and you’ll be rewarded by wines from a 1,000-year tradition that are bursting with local character.