DISCOVER SPAIN’S OFFBEAT GRAPE VARIETIES
‘Fragrant Albariño and tropical Verdejo were instrumental in establishing a new era of Spanish whites’
Spain’s vineyard is vast. According to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), the country has about one million hectares under vine, an area only slightly smaller than the entire county of Yorkshire (God’s Own County covers 1.1m ha). That’s more land under vine than any other country.
But if the vineyard’s scale has long been world-beating, its varietal composition hasn’t always matched its southern European peers for diversity. Or at least, any diversity has, until recently, remained hidden somewhat by the dominance of a handful of grape varieties: a mere 20 varieties take up a huge 80% of the land under vine.
The most famous – and, for the past decade, the most widely planted – Spanish grape variety is at least worthy of its position at the top. Tempranillo, the dominant or exclusive player in the great red wines of Rioja, Ribera del Duero (where it goes by Tinto del País) and Toro (Tinta de Toro), eclipsed the rather less exalted white Airén in the early 2010s, plantings having increased rapidly across the country in the preceding couple of decades.
Tempranillo is not the only varietal star to have made a name for itself in the 40 years or so since the modern, post-Franco Spanish wine industry really began to take shape in the 1980s. The fragrant, salty-peachy Albariño of Galicia’s Rías Baixas and the pungently tropical, aromatic Verdejo from Rueda in Valladolid province, a couple of hours northwest of Madrid, were both instrumental in establishing a new era of crisp, fresh, unoaked Spanish whites.
In red wine, Mencía – a variety that offers a floral-edged, crunchy-fruited character that has seen it compared to Cabernet Franc – has established itself as the base of some of northern Spain’s most attractive and elegant wines and is well represented on international wine lists and supermarket shelves. Look for examples from Ribeira Sacra in Galicia and Bierzo in Castilla y León. And, despite being better known
