Spanish indigenous whites
It’s hard to keep up with Spain’s dynamic white wine scene, and this tasting showed why, as the lesser-known varieties grabbed their chance to shine
This fascinating tasting featured as many as 19 grape varieties, and that in itself tells a story about the changing face of Spanish white wine. A decade ago, I doubt there would have been anything like the same base level of quality – or even sufficient examples of some of the varieties involved to make such an extensive tasting possible at all.
The emergence – or rather, re-emergence – of so many good-quality wines being made from so many different indigenous grape varieties is heartening, and adds enormously to the stylistic variety on offer from Spain. That white wine was, as recently as the turn of the Millennium, considered a weakness in a country apparently better suited to reds seems absurd from the vantage point of 2024.
While this tasting didn’t include any wines from one of Spain’s most-improved white wine regions, Rioja (Viura et al will be covered in a separate Rioja whites panel tasting), it did confirm how far Spanish white winemaking has come. It also offered reminders that vino blanco español is still very much on a journey.
As Ines Salpico said, ‘there is a lot of experimentation’ – a sense that Spanish white winemakers are still working out exactly what they want to do with grape varieties that are, in many cases (and despite the venerable age of some of the vines), still new to them; and how to best express their unique characteristics. Winemakers are playing with skin maceration – whether to add a little seasoning grip [from tannins] or to make a full-on orange wine – and trying varying degrees of lees contact for texture, weight or creaminess. ‘People are at different stages of the winemaking journey,’ added Matthew Forster MW. ‘But the interesting question for them when it comes to these indigenous varieties is: what are they trying to achieve? What’s an authentic style?’
In other words it’s still hard, in some, to pick out varietal character, as opposed to individual winemaking signatures. But there’s something rather exciting about this, the exploration and dynamism, plus what Forster called ‘crossfertilisation in terms of winemaking – trying different things, drawing on the knowhow’, adding that: ‘It’s a much more sophisticated wine culture than it was 10 years ago.’
More unpredictable, too. ‘The most exciting stuff is happening where you wouldn’t necessarily expect it,’ said Salpico, and our scores certainly reflect that. While the examples we tried of Albariño (easily Spain’s best-known white wine grape) and its fellow Galician Godello were consistently good, and while there were some very good wines made from another white grape with strong brand recognition, Verdejo, no single example of these established stars excited us in quite the same way as the best of lesser-known varieties, such as Albillo Mayor, Albillo Real, Airén, Hondarrabi Zuri, Palomino Fino or Xarel.lo.
But the biggest takeaway from this tasting was not so much the performance of individual varieties, more the sense it gave of modern Spain’s status as a rapidly expanding source of fine white wines. It was a tasting filled with wines of substance, character, complexity and, perhaps most important of all, great gastronomic possibility.