Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Grenache 3 ways, and over many decades
Back in the 1980s, when I was learning about wine, I used to cherish Châteauneuf-du-Pape. It seemed like an important and wonderful appellation. Certainly the bottles impressed me, with their dignified crests embossed right on the glass.
More to the point, these grenache-based wines from the Southern Rhône Valley were aspirational wines that I could afford. I had a particular affinity for Bosquet des Papes — considered an old-school producer even then — which offered the lift that comes with lively acidity.
I loved the gravelly red fruit and the herbal flavors that I found in these wines. But sometime in the 1990s, I lost the taste for Châteauneuf. Or rather, as the wines evolved stylistically to become fruitier and sweeter, sometimes bordering on syrupy, they lost me.
It was not just Châteauneuf. For a long time, its excesses seemed echoed in many wines made of grenache, or garnacha, as it is called in Spain, where the grape originated. Whether from other Southern Rhône appellations; Priorat, perhaps the leading garnacha-based wine in Spain; or myriad other expressions of the grape, they all seemed to be traveling the same multilane freeway of force and flamboyance.
I offer this background only to give context to what is now an entirely new age of grenache. All over the grenache- and garnacha-producing world, power has made way for wines of elegance and transparency. Fans of the big wines still have plenty of options, but it’s heartening to see a much richer spectrum of stylistic expressions of the grape.
What does history tell us? Efforts to narrow the stylistic or quality potential of many grapes are doomed to failure. Somewhere, an idealistic winemaker will pop up with wines that prove the narrative wrong.
We never want to blame the grape. We try to keep in mind that the wine in the bottle is most often dictated not only by the grapes but also by the site in which they were grown, the character of the vintage, the farming, the winemaking and the choices made by the people in charge of production.
It’s not easy to keep all that in mind. If your ideas about wine were shaped, say, from 1995 to 2010, you may have thought that grenache’s character was meant to be fruity and alcoholic. Even with my own memories of counterexamples and earlier iterations of grenache, I concluded in those years that I was not a grenache fan.
Because we understand how easy it is to fall into these traps, we periodically try to test our beliefs. If you think you don’t like a certain type of wine, try it again in a few months or in a year, or try a different producer. Over time, the narrow perception of what a wine can be evolves. So do our own tastes.
Grenache is an excellent example. Over the last month we have been examining three different expressions of the grape. I suggested three bottles:
A Tribute to Grace Santa Barbara County Grenache 2018
Comando G Vinos de Madrid Sierra de Gredos La Bruja de Rozas 2018
Domaine Gour de Chaulé Gigondas Cuvée Traditions 2016
The idea was to see how three wines made from the same grape from different parts of the world might differ.
The word terroir is thrown around a lot. I do my fair share of it, and I believe in its importance absolutely. But it is foolish to think that tasting three wines will reveal much of anything about terroir. Too many variables prevent us from coming to meaningful conclusions.
But we can still learn by comparing these three bottles. The Tribute to Grace was fresh, energetic and lively with aromas and flavors of red berries, flowers and herbs. I loved the elegance of this wine.
The Comando G seemed a little more intense and forceful than the California wine. It was likewise fresh and light on its feet and earthy from the start, with a chalky mineral quality.
Both of these producers exemplify the new wave of grenache. They make wines that demonstrate freshness rather than power and they view grenache as a grape eminently capable of expressing minute differences of terroir, very much like pinot noir.
The Gigondas was entirely different from the other two. If anything, it was a throwback to the sort of wines from the Southern Rhône I recall from the ’80s. The techniques used are time-honored: fermenting whole bunches of grapes, stems intact, rather than destemming, and long aging in large oak vats.
The result is a wine that is by no means sleek. Rather, it’s rustic in the best way, structured with grippy tannins, and spicy, herbal and floral along with flavors of red berries. Like all Gigondas, it’s not made entirely of grenache. It’s a blend: 80% grenache with the remainder equal parts syrah and mourvèdre.
What I love about these three wines together is that they all show the personality of the grenache grape while also telling us something about their places of origin and the producers’ styles.
When you need a wine under $10
Over the years, we’ve defined wines most often by appellation, occasionally by grape and, once in a while, by popularity.
But many readers have suggested that we look at wines by price.
If you want to explore the world of wine, to really get to know it, you have to be willing to spend some money.
So what is available at the low end of the price spectrum? This month we’re going to explore red wines that are under $10 a bottle. Here are the three bottles I recommend:
La Vieille Ferme Vin de France Red 2019, $8
Masciarelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2018, $9
Los Vascos Colchagua Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2018, $9
Now, I know someone, somewhere, is saying:
“$9 for a bottle of wine? Nobody has to spend more than $5!”
For $5, you will most likely get some pretty bad wine that has been heavily manipulated, farmed industrially or perhaps sold extremely cheaply on the bulk market for some other reason.
I’m very curious about these three roughly $10 wines. For years my position has been that the best values in wine are between $15 and $25. Good wines in that range cost enough (barely) to finance conscientious farming and non-manipulative winemaking. Once you get below $10, compromises are inevitable.
I hope that these wines will all be honest expressions, even if they turn out to be not the most complex bottles and are unable to articulate a sense of place.