The Booklovers' Guide to Wine

by Patrick Alexander

  Through much of the twentieth century, the only Spanish wines on the international market, other than Sherry, were from Rioja, and the highest praise that could be offered was to compare them to Bordeaux wines. Even today, Rioja wines are the most popular “foreign” wines in France. Since the fall of the Franco regime in 1975 and the subsequent modernization of the country, there has been a shift away from the Bordeaux style, and Rioja winemakers are returning to their Spanish roots and replanting traditional Tempranillo and Garnacha grapes. With a newfound local pride, they are promoting the unique tastes and traditions of Rioja while retaining the modern techniques introduced by the French. In addition to its famous red wines, Rioja also produces a light, refreshing white wine from the Viura grape, which is made to be consumed when young.

  That the wines of Rioja still command the greatest respect is reflected in the fact that it’s only Rioja (and some Priorat) wines which can earn the DOC - Denominacion de Origen Calificada classification on the label.

  Duero River Valley: The Duero river, which runs from east to west across Northern Spain, changes its name to the Douro after crossing the border into Portugal, where it joins the Atlantic Ocean at the wine-center of Porto. For much of the Middle Ages, the river marked the boundary between the Christian North and the Moslem South, but fortunately most of the vineyards were located on the north side of the river, facing south. In Portugal, the Douro river is home to the country’s most famous wine, Port, and in Spain the Duero river is home to three of Spain’s most famous wine regions.

  Toro: In the harsh and inaccessible hills towards the Portuguese border, the summers of Castile and León are long and hot while the winters are extremely cold. Wine has been grown here since the first century BC, but it’s only recently that the wines of Toro are being recognized internationally. Made primarily from the Tempranillo grape, Tinto de Toro, the wines are powerfully dark, fruity, and tannic, with high alcohol. Toro wines have been called the “rock star” version of the better-known Ribera Del Duero.

  Rueda: The white wines of Rueda—slightly upriver along the Duero from the Toro region—have been famous since the Middle Ages when the nearby city of Valladolid was the royal capital, and a labyrinth of deep cellars was dug to protect the wine from the brutal summer heat and the harsh winters. The wines are made with the Verdejo grape, similar to Sauvignon Blanc, but with a blue-green bloom and a distinctive aroma of laurel.

  Ribera Del Duero: Further up the River Duero from Rueda and due north of Madrid, the red wines of Ribera del Duero are experiencing a well-deserved popularity on the international market. Made from the Tempranillo grape, Tinto Fino, the red wines are often compared to the more famous wines of Rioja. The jewel of Ribera, of course, is Vega Sicilia, a mixture of Tinto Fino, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, which, because of its legendary exclusivity as much as its quality, is considered one of the greatest red wines in the world.

  Catalonia: With its own distinct dialect, its capital in Barcelona, and bordering France, this historic province in Northeast Spain has always pursued its independence in politics, culture, literature, and winemaking.

  The region was one of the first to introduce modern winemaking technologies and methods in Spain, and the subregion of Penedès is the most popular region for young winemakers to experiment with modern techniques, free from the limitations of tradition. Consequently, it is possible to find every type of wine produced in Catalonia and made from every selection of grape varietal.

  Cava: The most popular and famous wine is of course Cava, the sparkling wine of the Penedès region. Cava has been produced here since the 1860s, when Josep Raventos visited France’s Champagne region to promote his own Codorníu still wines and decided instead, on his return, to make Spanish “champagne.” Although using the traditional Champagne methods including remuage and riddling, Cava is made from three local grapes, Macabéo, Parellada, and Xarel·lo, as well as Viura from the Rioja region. Some Cava is made using the Chardonnay grape as in Champagne, but this is not common.

  Priorat: This area has been producing high quality wines since the fourteenth century when the Carthusian monks first planted vineyards around their priory (hence the name). The unique quartz and slate soil, combined with extremely hot summers, produces a powerful wine of high alcoholic content. The wines really emerged on the international scene after a group of young winemakers—“the gang of five”—started producing their wines using two low-yielding local grapes, Carinyena and Garnatxa (Catalan for Carignan and Garnacha grapes). It is in recognition of the outstanding quality of these wines that, along with Rioja, they have been awarded the highest Spanish DOC certification (DOQ in Catalan).

  Balearic Islands: Just off the coast of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands of Mallorca, Minorca, Ibiza, and Formentera have been producing wine since the Phoenicians planted the first vineyards around 1200 BC. Even during the Moorish occupation, the islanders continued to produce wine “for export to the infidels.” Today, especially on Mallorca, there has been a recent expansion of “boutique wineries” focusing on the traditional Balearic varietals, such as Manto Negro, Montrasell (Mourvedre), and Callet. The best wines are full-bodied, long-lived, and powerfully high in tannins and alcohol—very similar to the wines from Priorat over on the Catalan mainland.

  Jerez: Jerez is a small town close to Cadiz at the southern tip of Spain in Andalusia. The first vineyards here were planted by the Phoenicians three thousand years ago, and have been in continuous production ever since. The Palomino grape accounts for perhaps 80 percent of the vines grown in Jerez, while the other important varietal is the Pedro Ximénez grape used for sweetening.

  The wines of Jerez are called Sherry and are unique in two major respects. Sherry is a fortified wine, and after fermentation is complete, a distilled portion of the wine is added to the blend, increasing the alcohol level from about 12 percent to about 18 or 20 percent. Secondly, the Sherry is aged in barrels using the Solera process developed by the English wine merchants. Barrels of Sherry are stacked in rows, one above the other, with the oldest barrels at the bottom. Wine for bottling is always taken from the bottom row of barrels, which are emptied by about one third. The bottom row is then topped-up with wine from the second row of barrels, and the second row in turn is topped-up from the row above it. The top row is topped-up with fresh wine from the new year’s harvest. The wine, which is eventually bottled, will have passed through the different layer of barrels and will thus be a blend of many different vintages. Many soleras are over one hundred years old, and so their contents can include wines from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sherry is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Seven. It was the Palomino vines from Jerez which the Conquistadores took with them across the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, and which became the original vines of Chile, Argentina, and California.

  Galicia: Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain above Portugal, is not especially noted for its wines, partly due to its remoteness and also because of its extremely wet climate. For much of its history, Galicia’s economy was based on the “Camino” of Santiago de Compostela and its Cathedral. Throughout the Middle Ages and even today, pilgrims travel from all over Europe to pray at the shrine of the Apostle St. James.

  Some of those pilgrims included twelfth century Cistercian monks from Germany, who either carried seeds with them or actually planted the roots of the vine we know today as Albariño. The name actually means “white wine from the Rhine.” Although grown all over Galicia, the best Albariño comes from the Rias Baixas region along the border with Portugal. Over the border, the Portuguese call the grape Alvarinho, and use it for making the highest quality Vinho Verde.

  Albariño is fast becoming the most famous and popular white wine from Spain; refreshingly high in acidity, it also has a sweet floral nose, almost like Gewürztraminer, thus showing its German origins.

  Portugal

  Vines have been cultivated in Portugal for four thousa
nd years, originally by the Tartessians (the original, possibly Celtic, inhabitants of Andalusia), followed by the Phoenicians, Greeks, and, of course, the Romans. Most of the early wine production during classical times was concentrated in Southern Portugal, but in modern times, the wines of Northern Portugal have proved more important.

  Portugal is England’s oldest ally, and the two countries have enjoyed a close relationship, cemented by wine, since the Treaty of Windsor, signed on May 9, 1386, and still valid in the twenty-first century. This Aliança Luso-Britânica, between England and Portugal, is the oldest alliance in the world that is still in force. Portugal has always been England’s Plan B, and whenever, because of war or trade disputes, the English have been unable to import wine from France, they have traditionally turned to Portugal, and as a result Portuguese wines have always enjoyed favorable tariffs in England compared to the French.

  The English market was so important to the Portuguese economy that when local wine fraud threatened to destroy that market in 1756, the Marquis of Pombal created the Douro Wine Company to control and regulate the wine trade with what was in effect the world’s oldest wine appellation. In many respects, the controls introduced by the Marquis are still being enforced by the English, even today, as is discussed below in the section on Port wine.

  Napoleon’s invasion of Spain made strategic and economic sense, but the reasons for his invasion of Portugal in 1807 are less obvious. Since the British were unable to get wine from France because of the war, they had reverted to their usual Plan B and were shipping wine out of Porto. The reason that Napoleon wasted troops and energy to invade a relatively remote and unimportant country was simply to deprive the English of their source of wine. The invasion, however, had the unforeseen consequence of making the Portuguese royal family flee Lisbon and move the court to Rio de Janeiro. As a result, their hitherto ignored colony of Brazil subsequently became the preferred market for Portuguese wines. Nonetheless, the English market for Port wine from the Douro remains extremely important, even today.

  As part of the European Community, Portuguese wines have the following classifications which are displayed on their labels:

  IPR – merely indicates the source of the wine

  DOC – much like the French AOC appellation for superior wines

  VQPRD - Vinhos de Qualidad Produzides em Regiao Determinada, which is the highest-level possible and usually indicates Vinho Verde, Dao, or Port wines

  Vinho Verde: Vinho Verde is a wine region in the northwest corner of Portugal between the Douro river and the Spanish border of Rias Baixas in Galicia. Vinho Verde is the name of the wine produced in this region from a variety of local grapes. The name translates as “green wine” but actually means “young” wine, as it is bottled for immediate consumption. The most common varietal for making Vinho Verde is the Loueiro grape, but the best Vinho Verdes are made from the Alvarinho grapes, which are grown on both sides of the frontier.

  Vines in the Vinho Verde region are not laid out in vineyards, but are typically grown on trellises, up the sides of houses, or even up telephone poles. The wine typically goes through a secondary, or malolactic, fermentation in the bottle, which creates minuscule bubbles in the wine—not enough to make it a “sparkling” wine, but enough to impart a pleasing tingle. Because of the relative lack of sunshine and the heavy rain from the Atlantic, Vinho Verde wines do not have a high alcoholic content, with 8 percent to 11 percent being the norm. In order to qualify as an Alvarinho Vinho Verde, the wine must have a minimum of 11 percent alcohol. Vinho Verde wines have traditionally been grown by small family farmers for local consumption. In recent years, it has been discovered by the international market as a light, refreshing lunchtime drink.

  Dao Wines: The Dao wine region is the large granite plateau in central Portugal, which is also the country’s oldest established wine-producing area. The wine was already being officially classified and protected for the English market as far back as 1390. The region is noted for its powerful and tannic red wines made predominantly from the Touriga Nacional grape. Most of the unfortified red wines exported from Portugal come from this region.

  Alentejo: Situated southeast of Lisbon, the hot parched region was long known more for its cork forests and olive groves than for its wine. Since 1991, however, following the arrival of the Rothschild family investments, major international wine producers have been buying up land and planting vines, and this has recently become the most expensive vineyard real estate in Portugal. Although some international varietals have been planted, most of the grapes are indigenous, such as Tempranillo, and the resulting wines are powerfully rich and luscious. Definitely a region to watch.

  Mateus Rosé: I would be remiss while discussing Portugal not to mention Mateus Rosé, which is a medium-sweet, slightly-fizzy pink wine, similar to White Zinfandel, and especially popular with certain young women and elderly aunts. It was created in 1942 during a dark period of World War II as a way of marketing Portugal’s embarrassing surplus of wine. Oz Clarke, in his wonderfully entertaining The History of Wine in 100 Bottles, tells the heartbreaking story of the owners of the elegantly baroque Mateus estate, which is featured on the label of every bottle. Apparently, they were given a choice between payment of a lump sum for the use of the name and image of the château, or a royalty of fifty cents for every bottle sold. With annual sales of more than three million cases per year, Mateus Rosé accounts for over 40 percent of Portuguese wine sales. The owners, in 1942, foolishly insisted on a one time, lump sum payment.

  Port Wines: Port wines (Vinho do Porto) are fortified wines made from the Touriga Nacional grapes grown in picturesque quintas (vineyards) on the remote, steep slopes of the upper Douro river valley. The harvested grapes are pressed, often by human feet, to macerate the dark skins with the juice to create the desired dark color. The fermentation process is interrupted with the addition of distilled wine, aguardente, which raises the alcohol level, kills the yeast, and leaves residual sugar in the wine. The resulting sweet, alcoholic wine is brought downriver (originally in barrels in flat-bottomed boats, but now by road in tankers), where it is stored and aged in large oak casks for several years in deep cellars opposite the port city of Oporto.

  Wine production of Port in the Douro has been controlled and regulated since 1756, making it the oldest defined and protected wine region in the world after Chianti (1716) and Tokai (1730). The controls were introduced by the Marquis of Pombal to protect the quality of the wine for the English market. The continuing power and influence of the English is best illustrated by a random selection of names of the leading Port houses operating in Portugal today, along with the year of their founding:

  Churchill ,1981; Cockburn Smithes, 1815; Croft , 1678; Dow , 1798; Gould Campbell , 1797; Graham’s, 1715; Harris, 1680; Hutcheson, 1881; J.W. Burmester, 1750; Morgan Brothers, 1715; Offley Forrester, 1737; Osborne, 1772; Richard Hooper & Sons, 1771; Sandeman, 1790; Smith Woodhouse, 1784; Symington, 1670; Taylor Fladgate, 1692; & J. Grahamn, 1820; Warre, 1670

  Good English and Irish family names all!

  Since the seventeenth century, these shippers’ lodges—their offices and warehouses—have been located on a hillside rising up from the riverbank, in Vila Nova de Gaia, on the south side of the Douro facing Oporto, where the wine is aged, blended, bottled, and shipped. Each Wednesday at noon, members of these old English families meet at The Factory House (Feitoria Inglesa) across the river in Oporto, to make decisions concerning the international Port wine trade.

  These Wednesday lunches are filled with English traditions; for example, a copy of The London Times is made available at the lunch—always a copy with the current day’s date, but from the previous century. Another charming tradition is to refer to the Bishop of Norwich. Henry Bathurst, who was Bishop of Norwich from 1805 to 1837, lived to the age of ninety-three, by which time his eyesight was deteriorating and he had developed a tendency to fall asleep at the table towards t
he end of the meal. Consequently, he often failed to pass along the Port decanters, several of which would accumulate unnoticed beside him, to the mounting distress of those further along the table.

  When Port wine is passed around during the meal, tradition dictates that a diner passes the decanter to the left immediately after pouring a glass for his neighbor on the right; the decanter should not stop its clockwise progress around the table until it is finished. If someone is seen to have failed to follow tradition, the failure is brought to their attention by asking, “Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?” Those aware of the tradition treat the question as a gentle reminder to pass the decanter of Port, while those who don’t are told, “He’s a terribly good chap, but he always forgets to pass the Port.”

  But among all this charming tradition, serious business decisions are still being made concerning vintages, pricing, and international distribution of this multi-million dollar industry, which continues to play an important role in the economies of England and Portugal. Although most English people do not drink Port with lunch, except in the Factory House, they do drink it after dinner, usually with stilton cheese, and the bottle is always passed to the left.

  In the Wine Spectator’s annual ranking of the world’s Top 100 wines for 2014, three of the top four wines in the world were Portuguese, and the very top wine—best in the world—was a Dow Vintage Port.

  Italy

  When the Greeks first discovered the Italian peninsula, they named it Oenotria—the land of vines. It is probably the most perfect place on earth for wine production. It runs from the cool shelter of the Alps in the north to the hot coast of Africa in the south, and every vineyard in Italy is close to the shoreline and the moderating climate of the sea. The whole peninsula is bisected by the Apennine Mountains, a north-south backbone providing rainfall, shelter, and microclimates, with a mixture of volcanic, clay, limestone, and gravel soil—all perfect for the vine. It is not surprising that on average, Italy is the world’s largest producer of wine, outperforming even France.