Spain Annual Report: Tradition Unbound and the Quest for Drinkability

The world of Iberian wines is undergoing a dynamic transformation, led by an audacious new generation of winemakers. They are shifting the focus of wine appreciation toward a lighter, more delicate style that highlights clarity and drinkability over opulence and richness. The more wines we tasted this year, the more we felt the contrast and tension between the newer, innovative approach and the conventional, uninspired one.

It had been close to four years since our last visit to Spain, but during our recent expedition there in mid-August we re-embarked on our vinous odyssey with a marathon tasting. The results of our ratings of 3,875 wines in both Spain and Hong Kong include an awe-inspiring six 100-pointers, 20 wines that we rated either 98 or 99 points and a remarkable 165, or a little over 4 percent, earning scores of 95 points or higher.

Now, the question looms: who will step forward as the torchbearer for Spanish winemaking's new generation? Amid the steep, sun-kissed hills of Priorat, German winemaker Dominik Huber of Terroir Al Limit, who just turned 50, imparts a wisdom that transcends age and generational boundaries. He understands that his legacy as a winemaker has been helped by being an outsider.

“Actually, we have a certain advantage as foreigners,” he mused, referring to himself and his chief winemaker, Tatjana Peceric, who comes from Serbia. “We are culturally free and there is no tradition in our mindsets that leads us to make decisions that are rather historic and local when it comes to matters like picking time. We pick when it’s necessary.”

Unfettered by the anchor of tradition and the need to pass on generational wisdom, they are beholden only to the pursuit of excellence and their personal preferences.

"In Priorat, the first generation was the monks who brought winemaking here,” Huber said. “The second generation includes people like the father of Rene Barbier Jr. [of Clos Mogador], Jose Luis Perez [Mas Martinet], Alvaro Palacios and Daphne Glorian [Clos Erasmus]. The third generation is people like us.”

Huber makes one of his wines amid the dizzying heights of Les Tosses, a carignan vineyard comprised of inky llicorella slate. One might expect his wines to be as extreme as the place and reflect the “Terroir Al Limit” name, but if there is anything radical about these wines it is their clarity, fluidity, tension and drinkability.

Huber describes his wines as austere, honest, and clean – so much so that "you can read a newspaper through them." For him, it is essential to make wines that he can drink before they hit the wine store shelves.

With unvarnished candor, he also boldly declared his aversion to what he referred to as "big wines.” As he put it, “I just don’t like big reds. I prefer drinking whites or lighter reds.”

Huber's infusion-like winemaking style defies the traditional boundaries that separate reds from whites. Instead, it weaves them together in a tapestry that evokes the essence of a rosé – fluid and intuitively light, yet far from diluted. These wines possess a remarkable tension and gravitas, their impeccable freshness and vibrant energy leaving an indelible impression.

Notable producers such as Envinate and Comando G share a common lexicon with Terroir Al Limit. They speak of candid dryness, eschewing overripe fruit and cloying sweetness. They embrace tension and offer little in the way of flesh.

"For me, the wine must be digestible so I can drink a second glass," said Huber, who believes the alchemy of best expressing his terroirs lies in 100 percent whole-cluster fermentation and infusion winemaking without any oak. No destemmers or oak vessels can be found at his winery.

His Terroir Al Limit Priorat Les Manyes 2021 epitomizes this winemaking style. It's made with 100 percent garnacha peluda, the "hairy" garnacha mutation that thrives in dry and warm climates, producing less sugar and alcohol. The wine is wild, tangy, reductive and peppery, with a full spectrum of innate fruit beauty and complexity. But don't be fooled by the etherealness of the aromas. The abundance of flavor intensity and fine tannins with a nice touch of herbal bitterness at the finish, reflecting the Mediterranean landscape, lends just the right amount of gravity and seriousness to the wine, yet there is little heft.

REWRITING THE BOOK ON GARNACHA

In central Spain, the transformative shift toward wines with heightened drinkability and refined austerity is being spearheaded by a new generation as well. The movement, based in Sierra de Gredos, comprises about 40 producers who are trying to restore garnacha to its former glory.

Standing tallest among them is Comando G, a visionary venture run by Fernando Garcia and Daniel Landi, who showed us around their vineyards and new winery and let us sample their striking 2020 and 2021 vintages.

Walking in Comando G's 0.3-hectare, north-facing Rumbo al Norte vineyard reminded James and I of walking among the lost Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru, with its gigantic granite rocks setting the scene. The vines at Rumbo al Norte were mostly planted in the 1950s at an altitude of 1,075 meters. Very few would believe that this was once a nearly abandoned vineyard, just like many other vineyards in Gredos have been lost to time.

But the winemakers in Gredos today are like treasure hunters looking for new possibilities for garnacha in the region, especially among the higher sites and the cooler, northern exposures. For example, Aurelio Garcia from Cuenca has small, scattered plots around the villages of Navatalgordo and Villanueva de Avila for his project, Alto Horizonte. The well-known Argentine winemaker Alejandro Vigil recently bought the 0.7-hectare site of El Reventon from Landi, and his first harvest will be in 2023.

"Twenty-five years ago, nobody was here, but, you see, Gredos is hot now," said Landi, adding that he was certain more winemakers would be drawn to the area.

What makes Gredos unique is its prodigious rainfall, but it’s the composition of the sandy, granitic soils, interlaced with silt, quartz, iron and a very modest dose of clay, that imbue the best terroirs here with exceptional drainage capabilities.

Pedro Parra, the renowned terroir consultant and winemaker from Itata, Chile, has been working with Comando G since 2015, and has helped Landi and Garcia study and identify the potential of their soils.

"Here you have two kinds of vintages: warm and cold; Mediterranean and more Atlantic," Landi said. "The best vintages are always the cooler ones. The more rain and mildew you have, the better wines you could potentially make. 2010 was the first beautiful vintage, but we were less prepared. 2013, 2016, 2018 and 2021 are the coolest. 2020 was close, but there were a few very warm days in September.”

Their Rumbo al Norte 2020 and Tumba del Rey Moro 2021 both received perfect scores, with the Rumbo Al Norte being more mineral and complete and the Rey Moro wilder and more characterful, particularly with the warmer 2020 vintage. But both wines show incredible energy, with a prominent reductive, mineral quality, airiness and complexity – all woven into a feather-light outfit with transparent, lustrous grapefruit-zest color and ferric, mineral tension.

However, the distinction these wines enjoy today stands in stark contrast to their past reputation. Merely a decade ago, these pale, strikingly translucent wines that boast a luminous ruby sheen could have been considered diluted. Some even questioned whether water had been added to the wines. "You wouldn't want to hear what people said about us back then," Landi said.

Even today, the style of Comando G or the even "funkier" Envínate, for example, is still considered geeky and even a bit neurotic and probably too austere and challenging for some. "They are very different, interesting garnachas,” said Juan Carlos Lopez de la Calle of Artadi in Alava, who made wines near Gredos in the past. “Gredos makes very nervy and linear wines with a very strong personality from its poor granitic soils. For me, I feel they are wines that want to scream, but in the end, they are contained and not expressive.”

During the insightful discussions we held with a number of winemakers in Spain, their mixed feelings were evident as they wrestled with the emergence of remarkably drinkable and intuitively crafted wines hailing from regions like Gredos, Bierzo, Galicia, and even Priorat. But Sara Perez, the winemaker behind Priorat's Mas Martinet and Venus La Universal, a joint project with her partner, Rene Barbier Jr., said no war was brewing between the new generation and the traditionalists, although the latter group, she said, feared losing dominance.

"The more 'intuitive' group is not worried, and we are not interested in what is happening on the other side,” she said. “But the more conventional group is very interested in what has been going on here.

"For decades, they have been dictating what is deemed right and what is deemed wrong,” she said. “And now, a collective voice says no, you cannot dominate anymore.”

Even in appellations like Ribera del Duero, which has a name for power, oak and extraction, leading producers like Pingus and Vega Sicilia are becoming more acute and precise with harvest and winemaking as they pay greater attention to the new order.

"Nowadays, we like to pick very al-dente from our 200 hectares of vines, of which only around 140 are used. The rest that does not qualify … will be sold," said Vega Sicilia’s technical director, Gonzalo Iturriaga.

The quality of their Vega Sicilia Ribera del Duero Valbuena 5 is getting finer and finer with each vintage, even catching up to their Unico, and the 2019 version is, in fact, one of our favorites from Ribera del Duero this year.

For Peter Sisseck of Dominio de Pingus, it took time to make changes to his operation and fine-tune his wines, dialing back from what was considered 200 percent new oak in the past. Climate change, he added, is an even more pressing issue than stylistic proclivity.

"If you want everything to stay the same, you must change everything," Sisseck said, quoting a line from the Italian movie Il Gattopardo, which depicted a Siclian family’s adaptation to social changes during the unification of Italy in the 1860s.

The first true impact of climate change was felt in 2005, he said, and they started dialing back in the 2006 vintage. "But we were still looking for ripeness at that time. Then 2009 and 2010 came, and that was a sign [that climate change is really happening]. 2014 was classic, and 2015 was warm again. The drastic change happened in 2016, and 2021 was in line with 2016," he said.

The Dominio de Pingus Ribera del Duero Pingus 2021 is one of the best we have tasted from Pingus, showing a combination of depth and finesse with natural richness, concentration and freshness at the same time. As a brooding and embryonic Pingus, it will need time to unwind, but its impeccable balance and superb tannin quality mean you can open it young.

THE TWO WORLDS OF RIOJA

There is also a shift underway in Rioja as a result of the intense clashes between major brands known for their commercially stylized wines and the smaller, terroir-focused producers in the region.

"There are two worlds in Rioja,” said Telmo Rodriguez of Remelluri and Bodega Lanzaga. “You have the wines made in a winery and wines made from vineyards and terroirs,” with the latter separating themselves from operations that follow a “fixed” style.

Remelluri and Bodega Lanzaga continue to produce wines that embody ambition and promise, but it is Rodriguez’s third vintage of his special project, Yjar, that represents a more intuitive and authentic expression of the 2019 vintage in Rioja. This year, we found ourselves favoring the Yjar 2019 when compared with his Las Beatas 2020. The latter hails from a 1.9-hectare flagship vineyard that exudes a “natural flair,” as I wrote last year, although the 2020 vintage presented additional challenges due to disease.

Rodriguez said one of the challenges in Rioja was that winemakers had been “kidnapped by a system” where consumers are acquainted with Rioja based on the duration of barrel aging, with indications of Crianza, Reserva and Gran Reserva on the label.

Today, he said, winemakers realize the system no longer “makes any sense,” even though in the past it had proven especially beneficial in the market for the less expensive and bulk-produced Riojas, providing consumers a little more predictability about the liquid inside the bottle. But it also contributed to a certain level of standardization and homogenization of Rioja through an emphasis on barrel aging.

Now, when it comes to the upper echelons in Rioja that aspire to produce world-class wines, the focus is on the agricultural nature of wine, with a strong emphasis on the terroir and grape rather than on the aging process.

Rodriguez said he had abandoned the old idea of Rioja and instead follows the philosophy that "Rioja was and is beautiful if you have an amazing vineyard,” disregarding the barrels.

When Artadi quit Spain’s oldest DO in 2015 and started labeling their wines Alava instead of Rioja, it created rifts between the smaller producers in Alavesa, who prioritized quality, and the larger, more commercially successful businesses that focused on quantity.

The discontent among smaller, terroir-sensitive producers led to a change in rules. In 2017, Rioja's regulatory board introduced a new classification based on the concept of origin that runs parallel to the old one. However, the change was not considered radical enough, particularly by the Basque producers, which led to a new petition from the Association of Rioja Alavesa Wineries (ABRA) to establish "Viñedos de Alava." The final decision on this matter still awaits a ruling by the European Union.

Amid the clashes, the future of Rioja seems uncertain. When I raised the question with Rodriguez about the possibility of allowing the use of, for example, larger oak vessels for the Reserva and Gran Reserva categories, Rodriguez simply answered: "Reserva and Gran Reserva are already part of the past. A new life is arriving in Rioja."

We don’t know what exactly this new life looks like, but we know that it might not please everyone. However, what remains unequivocally important is the quality of the wine itself, transcending the business models, ideologies and politics that often complicate the essence of the drink.

What we do know is that today, exceptional Rioja wines are being made from reputable producers with distinctive visions.

While we see the success of producers like Artadi (not Rioja anymore), whose Artadi Álava Viña El Pison 2021 we rated 100 points, along with giving four other Artadi wines 99 points each, there are also great bottles being made by wineries like Lopez de Heredia and Marques de Murrieta, who hold a deep reverence for their respected histories and traditions. At Lopez de Heredia, the terroir message from the Tondonia vineyard rings clear despite the extensive aging of the wines in dusty, mold-covered old barrels.

At Marques de Murrieta, we had a memorable vertical tasting of the very old vintages of Castillo Ygay with owner Vicente Dalmau and winemaker Maria Vargas. It was a compelling testament to the fact that the reliance on barrels and extensive aging, whose merits are often debated, can lead to exceptional bottles, too. Some of the wines we tasted were aged for decades in barrels, but these Castillo Ygays still showed beautifully. The legendary 1964 vintage, for example, was aged for more than 22 years. The 1959 was bottled in 1986, after 30 years’ aging in barrels, and the 1934 Ygay was aged for 38 years! The newest vintage that will be released by the end of this year, the Marqués de Murrieta Rioja Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial 2012, also received 100 points, and James believes it will be a great addition to this celebrated line but with reduced aging in barrels, including 34 months in 225-litre American oak barrels for tempranillo and 34 months in 225-litre French oak barrels for the 19% of mazuelo.

READ MORE: BAROLO AND BARBARESCO ANNUAL REPORT: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

There are also large-size producers in Haro like CVNE, who excel in highlighting freshness and linearity. We also had the pleasure of visiting leading producers in Haro such as Muga, Rioja Alta and Roda, each exemplifying their visions and styles with seamless blends of plushness, savoriness and freshness.

What has become evident is that astute producers are attuned to the shifting tides of climate change and ever-more diverse and evolving consumer preferences. Take Alvaro Palacios, for instance. While his garnachas are not as geeky as Terroir Al Limit or Comando G, they have strived to hit new heights of refinement and freshness, especially with the 2021 vintage.

Palacios, however, remains steadfast in his pursuit of crafting what he deems "le grand vin rouge worthy of eulogy," as he told me when he was in Hong Kong this year. A decade ago, the phrase "le grand vin rouge" might have suggested a powerful, concentrated wine, but today, it is a matter of balance, captivating complexity, freshness and exquisite finesse. The notion of grandeur is no longer solely defined by strength, density and intensity.

For the crème de la crème this year, Palacios still holds a place. I urge you to look for his Alvaro Palacios Priorat La Baixada 2021, which is a stunning wine with a relatively accessible price, especially compared with his L’Ermita, which is regularly one of Spain’s most expensive wines. Of course, his Rioja wines, especially the Palacios Remondo Rioja Quiñón de Valmira 2021 and those of his Bierzo project, Descendientes de J. Palacios, are equally awe-inspiring.

The final sojourn of our Spain trip took me to Clos Mogador in Gratallops, Priorat. The 2023 harvest appeared to be one of the most challenging in the history of Gratallops. On Aug. 21, Rene Barbier Jr. of Clos Mogador had already started harvesting the carignan in his Manyetes vineyard, which is nestled on south-facing slopes with slate and llicorella soils.

"We used to pick one part very crunchy and one part riper, but this year it's impossible, it’s crazy," he said. "Heat was not the only concern. Drought is a bigger threat. We didn't get much water this year, especially from winter," he lamented.

But climate change won’t dissuade savvy winemakers in Spain, like Barbier, from aiming for freshness and crunchiness in their wines. Quite the contrary, it might prompt them to act quickly and make the necessary changes to survive and thrive.

"Ultimately, whether we like it or not, we must adapt and make adjustments by harvesting earlier," Barbier emphasized.

In other words, for Spanish wine producers, changing everything to stay the same now appears to be more than just a line from a movie.

– Zekun Shuai, Senior Editor