Around Spain in 10 Garnachas
Happy in Spain’s often testing rural terrain, this once unfavoured red variety is enjoying a surge in popularity among growers and critics alike, as regional authenticity finds increasing favour. David Williams selects his 10 top producers and their wines
The story of Garnacha in Spain over the past century is a classic of the rise-and-fall genre. We might start it among the worried wine-growers in turn-of-the-20thcentury Rioja. Phylloxera had finally arrived in the region, having first been recorded in Spain’s south in the mid-1870s, and it brought to an end a period when Rioja – and many other parts of northern Spain – had enjoyed a vinous export boom, as the French (and other drinkers of French wine) looked south to find vineyards to replace their own phylloxeraravaged vines. Now that the plague had taken them too, Rioja’s growers were replanting. Garnacha, so hardy and generously productive, was there for them.
Elsewhere in Spain, other producers were making similar decisions in their vineyards. And so, in the first seven decades of the 20th century, Garnacha became the default choice of the Spanish wine-grower. It was a variety that could cope with the extremes of heat, wind and dust of the summers experienced in so many of Spain’s main growing areas. Thin of skin but tough of character, an early budder and a late ripener, it could, in bush-vine form, cope without irrigation even in the driest of places, and still provide grapes that yielded wines of great juicy sweetness, high alcohol and easy tannin.
As popular as it became for growers, Garnacha had never enjoyed the same recognition from consumers, if only because so few of them even knew they were drinking it. It was generally hidden in blends, and rarely appeared on wine labels. And as the new wave of quality-minded Spanish winemakers began to make their way in the heady post-Franco days of the 1980s, Garnacha fell from favour: the area covered by the variety fell from more than 170,000ha in 1980 to 63,000ha in the mid-2010s
(Source: Robinson & Harding, The Oxford
Companion to Wine), replaced by the newly fashionable international varieties and – for the producers looking to grab some of Rioja’s stardust – Tempranillo.
But the seeds of Garnacha’s modern-day recovery were already being sown in the years of its decline. In its original northeastern heartland in Aragón – birthplace of Garnacha – and in Priorat in Catalonia, producers began to reassess what was possible from the variety, and to realise what a precious resource the very old, often abandoned bush-vine vineyards of the variety were. It’s a process that has been repeated in the early 21st century by winemakers exploring the Sierra de Gredos mountains around Madrid.
Today, Garnacha is very much back, as arguably Spain’s most exciting indigenous red grape variety. In one mode, it makes some of the best-value red wines in the world in an exuberantly fruity, juicy style. At the other extreme, it makes gloriously light and ethereal, terroir-revealing styles that have seen it dubbed ‘the Pinot Noir of the south’. Between those poles, you’ll find a multiplicity of styles that take you through some of Spain’s most thrilling vinous terrain.
‘Today, Garnacha is very much back, as arguably Spain’s most exciting indigenous red grape variety’