Wine regions guide
Spain has more land under vine than any other country. Walk into a Swiss shop and you will usually find one region of it.
We stock no Rioja. Not out of stubbornness, but because what interests us happens elsewhere: on slate terraces above a Galician river, on old bush vines in Valencia, on Bierzo slopes that were still selling wine by the barrel twenty years ago.
Rioja is good. That is not the point. The point is that Spain has several hundred native grape varieties and most of them never cross the border. Sousón. Caiño. Merenzao. Brancellao. Treixadura. Doña Blanca. If you have never read those names, that is not on you.
All of them are in our range. The five regions below are the ones we actually buy from, and we buy from them because we have been there.
The Romans made wine here because the river handled the transport. What remains are terraces with gradients up to 85 percent above the Sil. Machines cannot get up there. Picking is done by hand, sometimes on ropes.
Mencía from these terraces is taut: dark cherry, violets, a note of wet earth and an edge that reads as salt. Godello alongside it carries an acidity that owes more to the Atlantic than to Spanish sun.
Four of our growers work here: Algueira, Guimaro, Ronsel do Sil and Carlos Carballo. That is not a coincidence. The Ribeira Sacra is the region we think about most.
Twenty years ago Bierzo mostly supplied bulk wine. Then a handful of growers started taking the old Mencía vines on the slopes of the Montes Aquilianos seriously.
Mencía tastes different here than in the Ribeira Sacra: more fruit, softer tannins, less granite on the finish. If you want to start with this grape, start in Bierzo. It is the friendlier version. Sangarida works in San Lorenzo with vines over fifty years old, Mas Asturias a little further along.
The rest of Galicia feels less like Spain and more like northern Europe. Green hills, Atlantic, plenty of rain. You taste exactly that.
Albariño from the Rías Baixas brings citrus, sea salt and an acidity that goes with anything out of the water. Attis and Veigamoura make it the way we like it: no oak, no make-up.
Further inland in the Ribeiro, Inma Pazos runs Coto de Gomariz biodynamically. Her Treixadura shows that Galician white can have body, not just freshness.
For decades Bobal was the grape you turned into bulk wine and grape concentrate. It got treated accordingly. What survived in Utiel-Requena are old bush vines that almost nobody outside Spain knows about.
Take it seriously and you get a red with dark fruit, herbs and an acidity you would not expect in southeastern Spain. Our Bobal comes from Pago de Tharsys, Vera de Estenas and Verónica Romero.
If you want to go deeper, we wrote a whole piece on the grape.
The one region on this list that is genuinely well known. We carry Bodegas Raíz de Guzmán from there, because their wines have the power the region is known for without drowning in oak.
Priorat, Jumilla, Toro. Three regions that appear in every guide to Spain, and we do not have a single bottle from any of them.
Not because the wine is worse. Because we have not yet found anyone whose cellar we have visited and at whose table we have eaten. We do not buy any other way. When that changes, you will hear about it.
If you have never drunk your way through northwestern Spain, take a Mencía from Bierzo. It is the easiest door into this corner. From there you end up in the Ribeira Sacra almost by yourself, and that is where it gets interesting.
Handverlesene Weine aus den Regionen, die wir in diesem Artikel vorstellen – direkt aus der Schweiz bestellen.
Mehr über Rebsorten, Regionen und die Menschen hinter unseren Weinen.
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