Some of my friends accuse me of not really being yet a sophisticated wine creature, because I am still more of a red wine than a white wine personae. They are my friends and I am not going to change them, just because they are wrong. They will be happy, however, to drink with me this coming Christmas a great white wine. My holiday wine is called “Trossos Sants 2011” (which can be translated “Bits and Saints”), from the south of the Montsant region, in Cataluña. We have to thank wine maverick and architect Alfredo Arribas for his invention, that combines white Grenache grapes from old vineyards, with a touch of grey Grenache ones. Alfredo has moved away from the concept of winery into the magical idea of “wine series”, preaching the good news from his collection of “unique terroirs”, selected one by one (that is where the “Trossos” name comes from). A very serious and classic wine, that transforms fruit into a living thing and can evolve beautifully in the bottle for years. At a very affordable price of 16 euros, the horrible postmodern label should not deter you.
I have spent some wonderful days in Lisbon. Last night, I went back to Praça do Comércio, the amazing square where the Royal Palace was, right next to the water. I walked around after a warm October day and had dinner at the Chefe Cordeiro restaurant, right under the arches, almost touching the Tagus river and Atlantic infinity.
I tried two very good wines with an assortment of Portuguese chouriços and a rice with lobster cooked with somewhat hot spices. The first wine was Marques dos Vales 2011, from Algarve, a “blanc de noir” (a white which should be red), made with Castelao grapes. Even if the name is a fake one (there is no such nobility title), it is one of the most transparent and delicate wines I have ever tasted. I have been told it sells at less than 10 euros. It reminded me of apples and had a long finish, like Portugal’s never ending conversation with its past. The second wine was a red-red, called Quinta do Gradil 2010, made with cabernet sauvingnon and tinta roriz grapes near Lisbon. It is a very elegant wine, that went very well with the imperial majesty of the square, painted in royal yellow.
Pairing red wine and Japanese cuisine is not an easy task. But I have discovered a new red that lets you enjoy the best Japanese dishes and even enhances the experience. It is called “La Bruja Avería”. I drank the 2012 vintage at Miyama, Castellana 45, Madrid, a restaurant on its way to becoming the top Asian in the city.
La Bruja Avería is a name hard to translate (a witch in an accident? all suggestions are welcome!), taken from a muppet TV show in the eighties. The wine is 100% Grenache, beautifully made and tastes like roses. It comes from a Madrid winery, created by some Garnache lovers, called Comando G (no translation needed). It is presented in a fun bottle, which can be of one of four or five different colours, depending on your luck, or witchcraft.
I have been fascinated lately by the ideas of Denis Dubourdieu on wine. I came across them in an interview published some months ago, that I highly recommend: http://www.finanzas.com/xl-semanal/ella-el/20130127/denis-dubourdieu-espana-volver-4599.html
For those of you who do not read Spanish, or do not feel like doing a bit of research on him, Dubordieu is a celebrated Bordeaux vigneron and Oenology Professor. In the interview he was asked about wines in my country. Before answering he put forward his vision: “We need to create wines to drink, not to impress or get high points in a wine tasting event, where wines are just tasted and spit out. We need to think about those who will drink the wine (…) and find again the path of subtleness, adopt a certain minimalism in our wine making techniques and bring back to our wines delicacy and elegance in their purity.”
Yesterday I had the opportunity of drinking two Spanish wines who probably fit very well the Dubordieu ideal. The first one was an Albariño III Año from the winery of Bodegas Palacio de Fefiñanes, that had been aged thirty months, beautifully presented. Fefiñanes was the first one ever to bottle this wine. Since the XVII century, and now with Juan Figueroa at the helm, it remains true to a spirit of simplicity and wisdom. Fefiñanes knows how to let the wine express itself instead of playing around with it.
The second wine was Dominio de Tares Cepas Viejas 2008, from Bierzo, not far away from my beloved Galicia, made with Mencía grapes (and at amazing price of 13 euros). As you smelled and drank it, you could inmediatly connect it with the same vision of more subtle wines, less concentrated, never loud.
Duborbieu deserves to have many followers. In the interview that inspired me he advises wine lovers first of all to find happiness in life if you want to enjoy wine (not the other way around), since wine is part of our communion with nature. An openness to find pleasure in the world’s beauty will then lead you to subtle wines.
Abel Mendoza is one of the most innovative and dedicated vignerons in Rioja. He works with his wife in the village of San Vicente de la Sonsierra, already a legendary place for new-new things in the blessed region. They are true artisans of taste. I have tried three of their wines thanks to the recommendation of my friend Benjamin Lana, who prefers to remain anonymous.
I started with their youngest one, called Jarrarte Joven (5 euros), a 2011 wine which turned upside down my usually low expectations on carbonic maceration. It was like a glimpse of the summer, full of optimism and encompassing very different sentiments. A morning walk on the beach.
The second one, Jarrarte Crianza 2008 (circa 16 euros), is an outstanding wine at an incredible price, more like hiking with your best friends on a mountain all day long while picking strawberries.
Finally, I tried their top wine, called Abel Mendoza Selección Personal 2009 (33 euros). It is a perfect wine, delicate, profound, engaging, a wine to start a long conversation at the end of a day, a fireside chat that could go on forever.
Three splendid wines in one haiku:
sweet strawberry
laughing, dancing in my mouth
come soon summer season
I have been watching the London Olympics these days with the same attitude I taste wines. I admire the devoted search for perfection of both athletes and vignerons and how they try to improve their last jump or creation. I do not like how the games are often reported, as a competition between countries with the only goal of winning more medals. Similarly, I am not interested in the point system to measure quality of wines, that fosters a shallow understanding of the world of wine. In the spirit of “Chariots of Fire”, my favorite all time sports movie, we compete against our spirits, we train our souls.
Now that I have set the record straight, I would like to talk about three Olympic wines I have tried recently that live up to the dreams of the best athletes: citius, altius and fortius.
My choice of a “Citius” wine, one that takes your fast far away, is Mas de Ledas, a discovery made in the company of Benjamin Lana, the supreme wine connoisseur among my friends. We tried it in the restaurant “Surtopia”, an imaginative homage in Madrid to the Bay of Cadiz cuisine. Benja suggested this wine that I had never heard about. It comes from Bodegas Leda Viñas Viejas, of the Masaveu group, in Tudela de Duero. Mas de Leda 2008 totally suprised me, with a perfect and striking combination of fruit notes. At a price of circa 15 euros, this is the Usain Bolt of the new Spanish reds.
The award for an “Altius” wine goes to Borsao Tres picos 2009, a young red made only from garnacha grapes, from Borja, in the dry region of Aragon. I served it in a wine tasting event for American friends and it quickly became the star among the different wines presented. Borsao Tres Picos challenges your ideas about Spanish reds and takes you to a higher stage. It sells for very good price, around 12 euros.
My “Fortius” wine is no other than Museum Real Reserva 2004, a strong red wine from the Cigales region, Valladolid, that I tasted this week in La Coruña. Cigales is best known for its rosé wine, and yet it also makes impressive reds. Museum Real has a weird name name but it is a wonderful wine, made with tempranillo grapes. It has nothing to envy the Ribera del Duero wines in its surroundings. It improves with decanting and is modestly priced at 12 euros.
I have always admired the way Peter Sisseck invented his wine persona. The creator of the super expensive wine Pingus in Ribera del Duero called himself a “lazy winemaker”. From the start he surrounded himself in mistery. His first years of wine making he could not attend demand and people ended up queuing up to buy his small production. Very soon he became a legend. The proof of the pudding in in the eating and in his case the strategy of “storytelling” clearly worked.
After almighty Pingus, Sisseck went on to create Flor de Pingus. Recently he has put on the market “PSI”, for 28 euros, which I have just tried and enjoyed a lot. PSI is not his Armani Jeans version of the Pingus upmarket family, it is a different creature. PSI 2009 turned out to be a fantastic Ribera del Duero wine, young and fresh, direct and cool. We tried it in Luzy Bombón, the Catalan restaurant with the best view of life in Castellana that serves as a natural reserve for the benefit of the Madrid fauna and flora.
I have tried recently three wines that share two common traits: greatness, combined with a bad name. How come wine makers (or vignerons, if you prefer) sometimes choose names without thinking twice about how well they will sound and what will they evoke? Our words are our worlds, as Philip Allot wrote, or in a close to home version, we live in the words we use, Octavio Paz dixit.
Here are the three wonderful wines that caught my attention in spite of their names.
The first one is Predicador (“Preacher”, translated into English), a fantastic new Rioja, around 18 euros, so well made that even the ugly label with a hat from a cowboy B-movie should not deter you from triying it.
The second one is El Regajal (around 15 euros), from the Madrid region, a successful experiment, made out of four different grapes (tempranillo, cabernet, shyra and merlot, from a beautiful Aranjuez vineyard that is also a butterfly natural reserve. In this case the label improves the harsh sounding name of “regajal”: with an expresionist drawing of a butterfly, inspired long ago by Diego Mora-Figueroa, artist and friend.
The third wine is Eolo, from Navarre, a modest wine (around 4 euros, can you beat that?) that in spite of this silly name (Eolo is the god of wind, a tacky name with no connection to the wine) is worth trying, a very good coupage of Cabernet, Garnache, Merlot, Tempranillo and Merlot.
In every corner of Spain today you can find excellent wines, and this is good and bad news. The downside is that too often you are expected to drink only the local wine and praise it as if it was the soccer team where your seven year old son plays.I have decided to resist this chauvinistic trend and this summer I have tried new wines making sure first that they did not come from the region where I was enjoying my holidays.
In Galicia I drank “El Médico”, a wine from El Bierzo, León, that was a marvelous surprise. This is a top wine made with modest and yet delicate “prieto picudo” grapes (“tight and pointy” grapes?), used for many years to make a simple, non pretentious and almost anonymous wine, sometimes mixed with mencia grapes. “El Médico” lives up to its name (“the doctor”). We drank it during a summer lunch in Monterroso, Lugo, and its healing power accompanied us afterwards during a soothing walk along the Ulla river.
In Mallorca I have tried Joaquín Rebolledo’s Mencia 2010, a young and inexpensive wine from Valdeorras, Orense. This wine is a wonderful example of passion and dedication to the Mencia grape. We tasted it in almost total darkness, sitting under a pomegranate tree in the scented garden planted by my sister Mónica. The wine resisted well competition from other wondrous aromas of the carthusian summer night.
Last Friday I tried for the first time Katalin Iturzaeta, a txakoli wine made by the Aranzabal family since 1898 in Guetaria, Guipuzcoa. My friends Maite Aranzabal and Fernando Cortiñas had organized a dinner at their new home to gather some Bostonian buddies before the summer Diaspora. Maite offered this white wine as an aperitif to fight the Madrid heat and very quickly we were enchanted by it. Katalin is a light, acid, perfect txakoli, with a bouquet of lemon and other citrics and 11,5% alcohol content. The production is small, around 6.000 bottles a year, so it is almost a well kept secret.
The wine is named after Katalin Iturzaeta (in Basque Iturzaeta means “by the fountain”, according to Fernando, who has mastered the Basque language as only an Argentinean can). Katalin was the great grandmother of Maite, who started the family company at the turn of the XXth century. She was an admirable entrepreneur and also a strong mother, following Basque tradition. Katalin is made with “hondarribi zuri” grapes and the vineyards are in the Aitako hills near Guetaria, next to the sea and surrounded by the Roman “calzada”, the ancient road system of the empire that brought civilization to Spain.
The bottle label has a drawing of the monument to Elcano, the first person who sailed around the world, a native of Guetaria and a true Spanish hero. Katalin Iturzaeta, however, was no less heroic and also deserves a monument for leaving us her wonderful moral example and her delightful family wine.
Iberians on wine 
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