- Insights
Spain Has Changed. Here's What to Drink Now
Old vines, young winemakers and a quiet Garnacha revolution. Spanish wine has changed more in twenty years than almost anywhere in Europe.
- Words By House of Decant
If your idea of Spanish wine is a bottle of oaky Rioja Reserva with a gold net round its neck, you are not wrong, exactly. You are just about twenty years out of date. Spanish wine has changed more in the last two decades than almost anywhere else in Europe, and most of the excitement is happening in places your parents never heard of, made by people who are not much older than the vines are young.
Spain has more land under vine than any other country on earth. For most of the twentieth century a great deal of it was farmed for volume, sold in bulk and blended into anonymity. Then, quietly, a generation of growers started asking an obvious question. What if we treated these ancient, gnarled, forgotten vineyards the way Burgundy treats its best slopes? The answer has been some of the most thrilling wine in Europe, at prices that still feel like a clerical error.
The Old Vines Nobody Wanted
The secret weapon is age. Across Spain, in the hills of Gredos, the granite of Galicia, the volcanic soils of the Canary Islands, there are vineyards planted sixty, eighty, a hundred years ago. Low-yielding bush vines, trained close to the ground in the old "en vaso" style, giving tiny crops of intensely flavoured grapes. For decades they were seen as uneconomic. Many were grubbed up. The ones that survived are now treasured.
Take Garnacha. For years it was the workhorse grape, made into jammy, alcoholic reds and roughly handled rosé. It was most likely born in Aragón, in Spain's north-east, and it turns out that when you pick it earlier, from old vines on high, cool, poor soils, it can be ethereal: red fruit, wild herbs, a lightness that has sommeliers reaching for the word "Burgundian". In the Sierra de Gredos, an hour or so west of Madrid, the growers of Comando G make Garnacha so fine and perfumed that their Las Iruelas is now chased by collectors who once only had eyes for the Côte d'Or. We wrote more about that here: Gredos Garnacha, Spain's answer to red Burgundy.
Spain did not suddenly learn to make great wine. It finally started listening to the vineyards it already had.
The New Guard
The people matter as much as the plants. Envínate began as four friends who met studying winemaking at university and decided to make wine together, travelling between the Atlantic edges of Spain. They work with old vines on the Canary Islands and in Ribeira Sacra, and their wines are crunchy, salty, alive. Their Táganan red from Tenerife tastes like a walk along a sea cliff after rain: red fruit, smoke and a lick of salt.
Telmo Rodríguez walked away from his family's famous Rioja estate in the 1990s to go hunting for forgotten regions, reviving vineyards from Málaga to Galicia. His Valdeorras whites, like As Caborcas, made from Godello on steep slate, are the kind of wine that makes you put down your fork mid-sentence.
And in Aragón, Master of Wine Fernando Mora makes wine at Frontonio from old vines in the Valdejalón, proving that a region once known for cheap Garnacha can make bottles of real finesse. His La Loma y Los Santos white is citrus, almond blossom and stone, the sort of white that converts Chablis drinkers on the spot.
The Classics Have Changed Too
None of this means the old regions stood still. Rioja, long organised around how long a wine spent in oak, changed its rules in 2017 to allow village names and single vineyards on the label for the first time. Ribera del Duero, with some of the highest vineyards in Europe, is producing Tempranillo with more freshness and less varnish than the blockbusters of the 2000s. Mélida's Eternauta is a good example: dark fruit, a little liquorice, and enough lift to make a second glass feel like a good idea rather than a commitment.
Even sherry, the most traditional wine in Spain, has its own revolution under way, with growers bottling single-vineyard wines and arguing about soil like they are in Meursault. That is a whole other story, and we have told it here.
By the Case
The new guard, by the case: a mixed six from the growers above, or six of one wine you will want to keep coming back to. Quantities are fixed.
Each Buy now link opens a pre-filled email to Patrick in our team at pdiggins@houseofdecant.com. Change the quantity if you like and press send.
The Insider
For the next time somebody says "I don't really drink Spanish wine".
- Spain has the largest vineyard area in the world, yet for decades France and Italy each made more wine. Many Spanish vines are old, dry-farmed and low-yielding, which is exactly why the best of them are so good.
- The Canary Islands were never reached by phylloxera, the louse that destroyed most of Europe's vineyards in the nineteenth century. Some vines there are still growing on their own roots, as they did before the plague.
- Garnacha, sold to the world as French Grenache, is most likely Spanish by birth. It has simply been travelling under a French passport.
- Rioja only began allowing single-vineyard names on its labels in 2017. For a region over a century old, that is practically yesterday.
- The steep terraces of Ribeira Sacra in Galicia are so vertiginous that grapes are often carried out by hand, or by tiny rail carts. The locals call it heroic viticulture, and they are not exaggerating.
What to Drink Now
If you want a quick tour of new Spain, start with three bottles. A Garnacha from Gredos or Aragón for the perfume. An Atlantic red from the Canaries or Galicia for the salt and the crunch. A modern Ribera for the comfort. Open them with friends, some jamón, some grilled lamb, a few anchovies on toast, and argue about which is best.
You will not agree. That is rather the point. Spain has stopped making one kind of wine, and started making all of them.
