In the little puddle of life that is the world of wine, there is fierce competition between trade fairs. Europe, the most important wine-producing continent, is the most obvious location. Vinexpo in Bordeaux once reigned supreme, then gave way to Prowein in Düsseldorf’s extensive but unlovely showground. Taking place last week, Wine Paris is now snatching the international wine trade fair crown from Prowein, the City of Light having more obvious and varied attractions than Düsseldorf.
Barcelona Wine Week is cunningly timed for the week before Wine Paris so that intercontinental visitors can combine the two. I spent a long day there for the first time this year and met wine merchants, sommeliers and wine educators from the US and Colombia inter alia.
As with most trade fairs, there was an associated programme of presentations and wine tastings, which is why I was there. Our Barcelona-based Spanish specialist on JancisRobinson.com, Ferran Centelles, and I had been asked to host a tasting of six handpicked wines to represent the glory of Spain — a tall order.
Ferran, known locally as Fredi, is a very special character. He is so popular in Spanish wine circles that it is almost impossible to make any progress through a wine-minded crowd with him, so many people want to salute him. I lost count of the number of people who came up to me at the fair prefacing their remarks, “I’m a friend of Fredi.”
He started out in hospitality when he was 17, as a commis waiter at the seminal El Bulli restaurant on the Costa Brava run by the world-famous chef Ferran Adrià. On the day he turned 18, his mother called the restaurant and asked to speak to Ferran, “because she wanted to congratulate me and see how I was doing. Of course, the phone was passed to Adrià right in the middle of a very stressful service.” From that day on, he was known as Fredi.
He rapidly worked his way up to becoming El Bulli’s somm and stayed there until its closure in 2011. I remember well, on one of our visits there, his proposing a range of sherries to go with our (typically extraordinary) meal. His extreme charm and enthusiasm stood out even then. By 2006, when he was only 24, he was voted Spain’s best sommelier in the Ruinart Challenge. Today, he is Adrià’s wine man, writing enormous books with him and for the elBulli foundation, as well as teaching and presenting wine in an unusually creative way.
His personal tasting before our joint one at the fair was an enquiry into so-called royal wines. He set out to demonstrate that, while there was no written evidence that Tokaj was, as legend has it, “the wine of kings and king of wines” in the French court, Spain could field many documented examples of wine appearing on royal tables such as Rueda, Cariñena and Alicante wines. To that end, he had ferreted around in many an archive, hired a well-known Catalan actor in full period costume to act out the part of King Philip II of Spain, and persuaded one of Barcelona’s top sommeliers to dress up similarly and hand out sweetmeats with the king’s portrait on them to every attendee.
Our tasting was a rather more conventional affair. Ferran/Fredi had combed through our database of nearly 14,000 Spanish tasting notes to identify the highest-scoring wines and came up with current versions of six tip-top representatives: a sparkling wine, two dry whites, an oak-aged rosado and two reds, including the latest vintage of Spain’s most famous wine Vega Sicilia Único.
Tempos Vega Sicilia’s CEO, Pablo Álvarez, was sitting in the front row, and two more of the producers featured were there too, which was a bit nerve-racking. Would I get the percentage of new oak right? Ferran, bless him, had briefed me well beforehand.
The top wine of Gramona, Celler Batlle 2015, was a gem, made from the classic Spanish sparkling wine grapes Xarel-lo and Macabeo, grown biodynamically. The Gramona family were early exponents of holistic farming with sheep, hens and horses as common as vines. They’re also distinguished by their classical way of making sparkling wine: the wine is aged on the lees of the second fermentation for a full nine years under natural cork instead of the much more common crown cap, and they riddle and disgorge the bottles by hand.
Then there was Rafael Palacios’s Valdeorras from his favourite vineyard O Soro and the “dream vintage” 2023, based on the local Godello grape. In hands as meticulous as Rafa’s, it can produce wines every bit as refined and long-lasting as a serious white burgundy.
The third wine was one with which I feel a particular affinity because I came across it even before Ferran did. I’ve always been fascinated by boiling hot La Mancha in south-central Spain, Don Quixote country that has traditionally supplied some of the cheapest bulk wine and grape concentrate in the world. Elias López Montero was born into a family wine business there and contacted me in 2019, sending samples of some wines he made from particularly old vines. He then came to London to tell me all about them, and the unusual La Mancha wine business. His pride and joy is a fascinatingly complex, multi-vintage dry white made from the local Airén variety, but in this case vines exactly as old as I am (ancient) with their produce aged in his family’s historic clay jars, once used for storing brandy. The particular wine we showed was a non-vintage blend made substantially of 2023 with a little oaked 2022 and 2021.
Oaked rosé is not a common style, but Rioja has a long tradition of making complex rosados aged for many years in the same old oak barrels as its famous reds, thereby qualifying as Gran Reservas. The easiest to find is the more expensive version from López de Heredia but Ferran chose an extremely well-priced 2013 from López de Haro, which proves that big companies can make fine wine too.
He suggested including a representative from a “new” Spanish wine region that he has been lauding on our site. Terres dels Alforins is not an official denomination but a group of villages in the hills behind Benidorm capable of making wines of unexpected delicacy. Our 2024 from Celler del Roure was also based on local grape varieties, supremely adapted to a hot, dry Mediterranean climate, the sort of vines the rest of the world increasingly needs.
And finally, Único 2016, the first, slightly subtler vintage for which the new winemaker Gonzalo Iturriaga was wholly responsible.
We could have chosen so many more wines: examples of transparent Garnacha, thrilling white Albillo and decades-old red rioja just for starters. But arguably the most glaring omission was sherry, Spain’s unique gift to the world.
Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com
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