b GOURMET wine b GOURMET wine
back to CONTENTS
Bodegas José Pariente in Valladolid recently celebrated its 25th Anniversary
It used to be said that Spain did not produce good white wines; only the reds were worth bothering with. Those were the days of heavily oaked white riojas, the much fresher Penedès varieties not for all palates - and the limited quantities of more agreeable assortments from northwest Spain that never seemed to be available outside the region. WORDS ANDREW J LINN
DIGNIFYING A WINE REGION
B
y the end of the last century there were several new, emergent, or reinvented bodegas turning out wines that would have been unrecognisable to the older generation. However, Spain has always had its innovators. Miguel Torres SA, today the nation’s largest familyowned bodega, started using stainless steel tanks in the 1980s, and Enrique Fournier changed
228 / JUNE 2022 ESSENTIAL MAGAZINE
the way the traditional Rioja bodegas practiced winemaking. The late Carlos Falcó, Marqués de Griñón, launched innovative projects in many wine-growing regions, and while Rioja is still possibly the most conservative wine area of them all, even here some bold ‘revolutionaries’ are creating wines as they think they should always have been made. Paco Hurtado, of Riscal, decided
some time ago that most barrelaged Riojas had too much oak, so now, after initial maturation, puts the wine into old casks where the wood effect is not so noticeable. He defiantly uses 40% of Cabernet Sauvignon in his Barón de Chirel, on the basis that his family was using the grape 60 years before there even was a Consejo Regulador to tell producers that they shouldn’t.
