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PAINTING ANDALUCÍA RED The wine map of Spain can be painted just a few basic colours: red, white, pink and brown. They overlap in many regions, but generally speaking each officially recognised zone has a dominant colour. The red of course is mainly Rioja and Ribera del Duero; the white Penedés, Rías Baíxas, and Rueda, while the brown refers to vinos generosos – ‘generous wines’ – mostly sherry. Nevertheless, over the last three or four decades, they have all become so jumbled up that we even have reds from the Rías Baíxas, a typically white Albariño area, and reds from the sherry zone. But which is which? WORDS ANDREW J LINN
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he Romans were the first to make wine in the Sierra de Ronda, not for their own local consumption, but to send to Rome where it was popular. So, when the trick question crops up: Who was the first to make wine in Ronda, Prince Alfonso Hohenlohe or Frederick Schatz? The answer is neither. It was a Roman. But since all the vineyards in Spain disappeared as a result of the phylloxera bug in 1877, a new start had to be made a hundred years later, and while sweet wine has been produced in the Málaga
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area since time immemorial, it seemed like a good idea to make some red. Anyway, the answer to the riddle is that, leaving aside the Romans, it was Alfonso Hohenlohe of Marbella Club fame who planted the first vines in Ronda, although Schatz got his wines to the market first. And while Hohenlohe’s project was initially successful but later faded, Schatz is still making a small selection of interesting red and white wines on his tiny threehectare plot. Certainly, there are several bodegas of note in the
Sierra. Cortijo de los Aguilares, founded by José Antonio Itarte in 1999 is probably the most successful. Its wines have won many significant international awards, thanks to young winemaker Bibi García and the way she handles the difficult Pinot Noir grape. There are a small number of hard-working Ronda bodegas struggling to get their wines more accepted not only locally but throughout Spain – quite an uphill battle when only about 15 per cent of the Coast’s restaurants list them. Ramos Paul makes a
