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| Avinyó vi d’agulla blanc Penedès 2024 (lightly fizzy) Mixtura “Mix” Blanco Ribeiro 2021 Rovira “Tosca” Palomino Fino en Rama Sanlúcar de Barrameda 2021 Succés Vinícola “La Trompa” Barberà de la Conca 2024 Soldavini “Merenxiao” Ribeira Sacra 2022 |
| Thank you, folks, for kindly dropping in. Why not sit a spell and take your shoes off? (The creak of a well-used rocking chair on the veranda; a well-used corncob pipe; a flea-bitten old hound mutters in her sleep, dreaming of old brooks run out of song and speed; the smell of camphor and rendering lard.) I want to tell you the story of the fate of Spanish wine here in the US of A. Why, back in the day, a bottle of chunky, rib-sticking, high-ABV Spanish red wine might set you back just a few dollars, and you’d look over your shoulder, wondering if you’d robbed the poor merchant who’d peddled it to you. These were invariably ripe, full-bodied wines, always red and dark as the night, and after a few swigs, you’d be set right, and the cares of the world would lift, if only for a precious few moments. Garnacha, monastrell, and tempranillo, picked ultra-ripe and aged in comforting new oak barrels, from regions such as Toro, Rioja, and Jumilla, were the primary variables. Still, the constants were monolithic, unprovocative, ripe wines that went well with a Ruth’s Chris steak and never, for a moment, made you think.
Given how long we’ve been making and drinking it (about 10,000 years), it’s ironic how rapidly things can change with wine. Today, we have access to an embarrassment of wine riches, including wines that are lean, nervy, and the farthest thing from ol’ Pappy’s rich, dense bottles of the 1980s and 90s. Part of this is political—some traditional varieties and their regional expressions, suppressed for decades under Franco’s repressive rule, have found a new audience; following Franco’s death, some of the old ways, which were sometimes very good, have slowly recovered. Another part is the shifting sands of consumer preference, with a growing audience for vivacious, lighter wines, and an openness to trying bottles from regions, grapes, and techniques that are old, but new again. And yet another part is a small group of dedicated Spanish wine importers, such as the intrepid Jose Pastor, who, contravening everything that was once on the market, brings us jewels. Our first wine tonight is from the Catalan-speaking region of Penedès. It’s delicately fizzy, not as fizzy as a crémant or a pét-nat, but just lightly so—the term for this in Catalan is “vi d’agulla,” or prickly wine. The grapes are macabeo, a workhorse grape also cultivated in France, and the gem of Catalan white varieties, xarel-lo, much of which ends up in sparkling Cava but is increasingly found in intensely mineral still wines as well. Next, two contrasting white wines: one, a blend of formerly suppressed white varieties, including treixadura, it manages to be both intensely mineral and textured; the other ages under a veil of “flor,” the Spanish term for the cap of wild yeasts that, in certain regions and conditions, can form on the surface of the wine as it ages in vat or barrel, imparting a unique, savory dimension to the resulting wine. To finish, two red wines: one made from trepat, a grape that until fairly recently was mostly employed as a vehicle for rosat, but when vinified as a red makes just the sort of chilled, pale, infused, low-tannin and low ABV (the one we’re tasting tonight is only 10.5%!) red wines that we want to drink, today; the other is made from an old, formerly suppressed Galician variety, merenzao (aka trousseau in the Jura, but with a very different expression in the northwest of Spain), lean and taut, and only 12% ABV. |