Our Excitement with Spanish Wines: More than 2,500 Wines Reviewed
If you thought our 2017 Spain report was extensive, then take a look at the mountain of tasting notes accompanying this text! The tasting team at JamesSuckling.com tasted and rated more than 2,600 wines in this report within the span of two intense and totally fascinating weeks.
The wide net we cast this year in Spain not only provides readers with a great tool when making buying decisions, it also enables us to find out a great deal about the way the good and great wines of Spain are developing. The most striking thing that came out of our tastings was the consistency that the majority of important Spanish wine regions are now achieving with their red wines.
We tasted 300 fantastic Spanish wines on this particular day in Rioja in blind tastings.
For instance, late in the afternoon on the day we devoted to tasting red crianza wines (the law requires a minimum of six months in oak and two years total aging before release for this category) from Rioja, we soon realized that everyone in the tasting team was rating them almost exclusively 90 or 91 points. The next day, a rather similar situation occurred with the red wines of Ribera del Duero, the home of Spanish classics such as Vega Sicilia and Pingus.
This is a continued shift from a generation ago when Spanish wines were regarded by savvy consumers as unreliable beyond a few long-established and dependable producers such as Torres in Penedes and a number of other wineries in Rioja. Moreover, the more recent aberration of Spanish red wines tasting jammy and/or raisiny due to the deliberate harvesting of overripe fruit is largely a thing of the past.
Today, it is much more about balance where red wines focus on pure fruit with a pronounced but not dominant oak character from barrel aging. As James Suckling observed, “When I started visiting Rioja in the 1980s, the wines had red-fruit aromas and a milk chocolate note, now they’re all blue fruits and bitter chocolate!” Rioja has reinvented itself in a bold but bright and balanced style, and that makes it one of the most consistent sources for dry reds on Planet Wine.
Consistency and dependability are exactly what the majority of wine consumers are looking for in the dense forest of wine brands. This is all well and good for us at JamesSuckling.com, but Rioja and other Spanish regions must continue to evolve in the direction of greater definition and interest at the same. That’s why we believe in single-vineyard and terroir-specific wines in Spain and applaud producers who are taking this route.
The team had a great tasting at Vega Sicilia with Pablo Alvarez Mezquiriz. As a result of great terroir and incredible attention to detail, the producer made extraordinary wines with power and elegance this year.
In fact, a number of producers are well advanced in the charge to a greater definition in Rioja and other regions, bottling single parcels from great and interesting sites. One is Telmo Rodriguez who has been a leader in this movement from his base at Remelluri in Rioja since the mid-1980s. He certainly delivered stunning quality in the favorable conditions of 2015. “It has taken me 20 years to get to this point,” he said to our team in June. “These are the best wines I have made!” The 2015 Las Beatas is a revelation, a near-perfect expression.
However, some of his colleagues in the region making world-class wines are less enthusiastic such as Carlos Lopez de Lacalle of Artadi, based in Laguardia: “Rioja is boring!” What he meant was that outside the top producers red Rioja is too monotonous in aroma and flavor. It’s one reason why Artadi doesn’t use the Rioja designation for any of its wines. That didn’t stop their concentrated and extremely polished El Carretil 2015 and El Pison 2015 — both single-vineyard wines from Rioja — from being some of the best wines of our tasting. Rioja can be so exciting!
Diversity isn’t only necessary to generate consumer interest, but also to prevent the kind of brutal competition that pushes prices down to the point where profit margins become wafer-thin. As Lopez de Lacalle explained to us, “20 years ago, the production of Rioja was about 80 million bottles per year and the grape price was 3 euros per kilo. Now the production of the region is 500 million bottles per year and the grape price is 1 euro or even less.”
Juan Muga of Bodegas Muga in Haro gave us a clear answer to the question why so many Riojas have a homogenous taste. “If you go over a certain yield, then tempranillo reds all taste the same!” Tempranillo is the dominant grape for Rioja, accounting for about 85 percent of red grapes planted (garnacha/grenache is in second place with 10 percent). Almost 21 percent of all Spanish vineyards are planted to tempranillo.
Things were definitely heating up in at the end of June, when the JamesSuckling.com team were tasting in Spain. Luckily, Bodegas Muga in Haro made refreshing rosés too.
Each of the Muga reds based on the tempranillo grape tastes very distinctive because the Muga family is achieving moderate to low yields and following excellent viticultural practices. Otherwise, they simply couldn’t make wines such as the Torre Muga 2015 and Aro 2015 — two of our best wines of the tasting. However, even the regular quality tempranillo-based reds from top Rioja producers, including Bilbainas, CUNE, Lopez de Heredia, Remelluri (Telmo Rodriguez) and Roda have tons of character.
All this said, the biggest surprise of our tastings came when we focused on the famous and mega-cool appellation of Priorat in the mountains of Catalonia. These red wines have a reputation for being powerful with a pronounced mineral character from Llicorella, a type of slate that is the dominant soil type in the region. Drink a Priorat red from Alvaro Palacios, Scala Dei or Terroir al Limit, the appellation’s leading producers, and you’ll find those qualities, not to mention a style that combines power with refinement. However, the majority of Priorat reds we tasted were still too jammy and heavy with no hint of minerality. It was rather disappointing.
“This is a very inward-looking winemaking community that doesn’t get the big picture,” explained an industry figure who wishes to remain anonymous. Unfortunately, myopia seems to be endemic to all sorts of regions across Spain.
We thoroughly enjoyed reviewing these top-scoring Cavas towards the end of our tasting trip in Spain.
Another negative for us were white wines in Spain with the exception of Rias Baixas in Galicia, which puts the rest of the nation in the shade. Of course, not every Spanish region benefits from the fresh Atlantic air that Rias Baixas does, but we are convinced many regions have a combination of climatic conditions and grape varieties well adapted to them that make fresh and expressive dry whites possible. Here too, winemakers need to get the big picture of what is happening around Planet Wine.
One of Spain’s strengths that is often forgotten is Cava or sparkling wines and we found a number of exciting examples. The cheap, mass-produced products filling supermarket shelves in many markets are responsible for Cava’s poor image. Yet, a slew of Cavas from the Penedes impressed us and scored 90 points or more. The best of these can compete with vintage Champagnes in terms of complexity and balance but they have a totally distinctive character. Check out Canals & Munné Gran Reserva 2011 and Codorniu Gran Reserva 457 2008, among others.
We hope that these observations piqued your interest in this year’s Spanish wine tasting. We were very excited after James, myself, Nick Stock and the rest of our team finished the last samples in our tasting. Spain has so many great wines of outstanding quality, and the most exciting ones are totally unique. Dig into our mountain of wine tasting notes and start discovering some of the best of Spain! — Contributing Editor Stuart Pigott