Around Spain In 10 Garnachas

Happy in Spain’s often testing rural terrain, this once unfavoured red variety is enjoying a surge in popularity among growers and critics alike, as regional authenticity finds increasing favor. David Williams selects his 10 top producers and their wines of the moment

- David Williams

The story of Garnacha in Spain over the past century is a classic of the rise-and-fall genre. We might start it among the worried wine-growers in turn-of-the-20thcentury Rioja. Phylloxera had finally arrived in the region, having first been recorded in Spain’s south in the mid-1870s, and it brought to an end a period when Rioja – and many other parts of northern Spain – had enjoyed a vinous export boom, as the French (and other drinkers of French wine) looked south to find vineyards to replace their own phylloxera ravaged vines. Now that the plague had taken them too, Rioja’s growers were replanting. Garnacha, so hardy and generously productive, was there for them.

Elsewhere in Spain, other producers were making similar decisions in their vineyards. And so, in the first seven decades of the 20th century, Garnacha became the default choice of the Spanish wine-grower. It was a variety that could cope with the extremes of heat, wind and dust of the summers experienced in so many of Spain’s main growing areas. Thin of skin but tough of character, an early budder and a late ripener, it could, in bush-vine form, cope without irrigation even in the driest of places, and still provide grapes that yielded wines of great juicy sweetness, high alcohol and easy tannin.