The Wines of Central and Southern Spain

              The first book I bought in the Classic Wine Library series was Richard Mayson’s Port and the Douro. I used to read it in restaurants around Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square when I was preparing for the Fortified Wines paper of the WSET Diploma. It was a book I enjoyed immensely, Port being one of my favourite wines as well as the one which had provoked my worst hangover. The book is now somewhere in Italy, never to be seen again.

        Since then I have read many of the books which followed Richard Mayson’s fine work, the latest being The Wines of Central and Southern Spain by Sarah Jane Evans, a Master of Wine and an authority on Spain. I was excited to read this, for I have travelled widely in Spain and like many of the wines a lot.

        This follow-up to 2018’s The Wines of Northern Spain is divided into six sections, starting with Catalonia. The writer notes that although this region ‘sits in northern Spain, its history and character is altogether Mediterranean. Hence its presence’ in the book. I’m not particularly interested in Catalan wines, but I make an exception for Priorat, which can cast a spell on any lover of wine: a remote appellation of hills and mountains encircled by another, and loaded with old vines. The book’s back cover features an image of the village of Poboleda, revealing the majesty of the setting.

        The section on Priorat is a microcosm of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. There is plenty of useful information and some lovely prose:

        The early morning journey had taken me from Barcelona along the coast and up through the clouds, with the hilltop villages of Priorat appearing above the cloud, and the magical Montsant mountain.

        Very evocative! The general discussion of Priorat, however, is restricted to four pages, whereas ten are dedicated to notable producers making the wines. I think it should be the other way round. There’s so much to say about a place like Priorat. We read, for instance, that there are ‘12 village sub-zones’ which comprise the Vi de Vila (village wine) category, but there’s very little here about them. It’s a pity, for it’s a really fascinating subject. (Admittedly, this skewing of the text in favour of producers is common to all of the titles in the Classic Wine Library series.)

        A chapter is devoted to sparkling wine. Again, it’s not a style of wine that appeals to me, but I learned a great deal. I was also pleased to read that Sarah Jane Evans shares my feelings about Macabeo, deeming it a ‘too-often plodding’ grape. I enjoyed reading about ‘the heart of Spain’ very much, for it’s an area whose wines receive scant attention in the U.K, and it reinforced my desire to go there. Places like Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha, both part of ‘España vacía’ (empty Spain) hold a fascination for me. In the author’s words, La Mancha is ‘a remarkable landscape’, where ‘vineyards extend as far as the eye can see’.

        One of the curiosities of the wine regions in central Spain and the Levante (the focus of chapter four) is the unexpected presence of certain grapes. I learned that the aforementioned Catalan grape Macabeo, for example, is the main white grape in D.O.s like Manchuela and Utiel-Requena, and that Albariño has migrated south to feature in the latter. Indeed, the book is full of interesting facts: Picapoll Blanco is not the French grape Piquepoul, sweet Monsatrell is made in Alicante and Jumilla, and ‘a plague of spiders’ brought a halt to organic production at an estate in Ribera del Guadiana in 2017.

        In my opinion, sherry could be the greatest of all wines. Reading about it was somewhat chastening, though, for I realised that parts of my recent presentation about the wines were in fact incorrect! It filled me with a strong urge to return to Jerez, however, for the prospect of trying an Amontillado with ‘an average age of 50 years’ at Bodegas Emilio Hidalgo left me salivating.

        To sum up, The Wines of Central and Southern Spain is a very well-written work which will appeal to lovers of Spanish wine, WSET students and those planning a trip to Spain. Only one thing is missing: a chart of vintages. I will continue to rely on a rule of thumb I picked up somewhere: if the year ends in the number 3, it probably wasn’t the best vintage in Spain. Or maybe that’s Rioja.

The Other White Burgundy

        I’ve sometimes wondered if people in Champagne are aware that the name Bouzy sounds funny in English. Probably not! Nor is it likely that vignerons in the Burgundian village of Bouzeron realise that the name has a somewhat comical ring across the Channel.

 

In fairness, I imagine that very few wine drinkers in the U.K. have ever heard of Bouzeron, let alone drunk a bottle of the wine. I knew next to nothing about the village or the grape Aligoté when, always eager to learn about wine and practice a bit of French, I signed up for a webinar on the subject run by Vins de Bourgogne.

Bouzeron was only granted AOC status in 1998, becoming the sole village appellation in Burgundy to be dedicated to the grape Aligoté. (There is also a more extensive appellation called Bourgogne Aligoté, which allows higher yields and takes grapes from inferior vineyards on the plains and on valley floors.) Bouzeron covers a small area and is situated next to Rully at the northern end of the Côte Chalonnaise, in a small valley flanked by two ridges. The grapes are grown on marl and limestone on the upper parts of the slopes, with the more illustrious varietals planted further down.  

There are no premier crus in Bouzeron, I learned, but the appellation does boast 26 lieux-dits. The climate is semi-continental, with southern (méridional) influences. Expositions vary owing to the hills and rifts in the land. Recent vintages (2020, 2022 and 2023) were solar and hot, with the cold weather in 2021 serving as an exception, as in the Rhône Valley to the south.

Robin Kick, the Master of Wine leading the webinar, explained in admirable French that, surprisingly, six percent of the vineyard area in Burgundy is planted with the grape. It’s therefore more significant than you might expect in this kingdom of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Compared to its famous white counterpart, Aligoté is more acidic and ripens later, which are distinct advantages in hot vintages.

Vins de Bourgogne was kind enough to send participants six samples of wine from Bouzeron in the post, to enable us to get a flavour of the appellation. I can tell readers that Aligoté does indeed have a ton of acidity – not quite at the Riesling or Albariño level, but very significant. The wines also had a lot of weight in the mouth.

At least a couple of the people involved in the online tasting deemed the grape to be ‘aromatic’, with white flowers, almond and stone fruits used as descriptors. Personally, however, I found it something of a challenge to pin down the aromas and flavours. My tasting note for one of the wines, for example, was that it was ‘like sniffing water, or Muscadet’, with maybe the faintest touch of lemon evident on the nose. Some of the wines definitely had a saline/mineral edge and the citrus character cropped up more than once in my notes, but that was about it. Either the French are just better at tasting than me, or the grape is in fact pretty neutral. I'll go with the latter. 

The ability of Aligoté to retain its acid, even in hot conditions, means that we may be seeing more and more of it from Burgundy in years to come. According to one vigneron who spoke in the webinar, it’s also ageworthy, and can be kept for a decade or more. I’m not sure about that. I can imagine it being like the mature Albariños I’ve had, which tasted very similar to the young wines but with less acidity.

At any rate, the future may well be bright for Aligoté in the British market. After all, who hasn't encountered a customer who can’t stand Chardonnay but loves white Burgundy?

Published in The Wine Merchant, June 2025.

Sherry

          I think the best bottle of wine I’ve ever had was a sherry.

       Before Covid, one of my former employers managed to secure some gift packs featuring a half bottle each of Bodegas Tradición sherry and Tomatin whisky. The selling point was that the whisky was finished in a barrel which had been used to age the sherry.

The price was great – a steal, in fact – but we couldn’t shift them. This being Scotland, folk were interested in the whisky, despite it being only a half bottle. Nobody wanted to take a chance on the sherry, though. Then some bright spark had a brainwave, we got rid of the gift packs and began selling the bottles individually.

As a sherry fan, I resolved to try both offerings. One of the sets contained a Pedro Ximénez VOS (Very Old Sherry), which had spent over twenty years maturing in casks. This stuff was stunning, and I write that as someone who’s not usually keen on PX. I love dessert wines, but the four hundred grams of residual sugar is too much even for me, and I have a lot of respect for my very expensive dentist. Beyond the typical hit of raisins, there were lovely flavours of coffee and chocolate. Not the elusive chocolate and coffee notes tasters sometimes reach for when sampling red wines, but profound, unmistakable flavours.

The PX merely played second fiddle to the sherry in the other gift pack, however, a VORS (Very Old Rare Sherry) Oloroso, which had been aged for over thirty years. The most remarkable thing about this wine was that it completely changed while I was drinking it. It started with an explosion of nuts which lingered before transforming entirely on the finish, which was endless. I’m a pretty good taster, but I still haven’t managed to pinpoint what was in that second cascade of flavour, and I had about six half bottles!

Alas, despite the sherries being superlative, we couldn’t sell them, except to one customer: me. The half bottles of Tomatin were, needless to say, another matter entirely, and were snapped up by whisky-loving Scots and American tourists, the latter constituting a much-valued clientele in Scotland’s capital.

I trace my enthusiasm for sherry to a trip I made to Seville many years ago with my uncle. One of the first bars we visited was an atmospheric establishment called Hijos de E. Morales, which is close to the city's colossal cathedral. By a wall were barrels bearing the labels Fino, Manzanilla, Amontillado and Oloroso. The gruff and proud-looking men behind the bar would greet us with a loud ‘digame’ or ‘dime’, pour a glass from one of the barrels for about one euro fifty, then slap the change down on the counter. After a couple of lunchtime visits, I quickly learned the value of a siesta.

I have returned to Seville, and Morales, many times since then. If you like sherry, I recommend you do the same. My sole visit to Jerez regrettably involved no more than a change of bus. One day I shall return and remedy that missed opportunity. Perhaps someone at a bodega will even be able to explain what a palo cortado is. 

Jakey Season

             The weather north of the border has begun to warm up. Yes, it can happen, although anyone who visited in 2024, the year of the summer that never was, may be surprised to hear that. With warmer temperatures, we enter ‘Jakey Season’.

Edinburgh

       I wish I could claim the credit for coining this term, but the first time I heard it was from a former manager. My English brethren are likely unaware of the meaning of the word jakey, so I have a definition from Dictionaries of the Scots Language for them. A jakey is ‘a slang word for a down-and-out, especially one who obviously drinks lots of jake [methylated spirits].’ I think this definition can be extended to include anyone with a substance abuse problem, and who’s not above stealing.

       Well, there are a lot of them up north, although it’s of course not a phenomenon limited to Scotland. I noticed an ample supply of jakeys on a couple of recent visits to London (I’ve been away from England for so long that I’m unfamiliar with the equivalent term.) And they do come out into society when the weather takes a turn for the better. Who knows how they fill their time in the long winters.

       I used to work on Leith Walk in Edinburgh, a street which didn’t have the finest reputation. It’s now probably less sketchy than it was, but no eyebrows would be raised if you were to inform someone that you’d run into a spot of bother there. It was here that I became very familiar with jakeys.

       I was generally very reluctant to leave our door open, for obvious reasons. One brilliant summer’s day, though, we took the risk. Within a short time, a tall and extremely thin man reeled into the shop like a zombie. He didn’t respond to my greeting – a bad sign - and walked straight over to the Italian section. He grabbed a bottle of wine, then bolted. My colleague gave chase, but the guy was, shockingly, as fast as a gazelle, even if his trousers did fall down as he was heading up the street.

       My eyes turned to the Italian section to see what the jakey had swiped. It was a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino! My mind promptly conjured up an image of him sitting on a bench in a dodgy park, or perhaps just sprawled out on the grass, swigging that excellent wine straight from the bottle. Talk about a waste.

       Readers would be wrong to assume that the jakey profession is restricted to men. There were a number of lasses with inglorious reputations in that part of the city. I recall another incident – again, on a fine summer’s day – when a female jakey zig-zagged through the open door. My alert level shot up like that of a twitchy cat. I told her I wouldn’t be able to sell her a drink as she was clearly intoxicated. Perhaps I approached the matter the wrong way, but I was trying to follow our legal obligations.

       She ignored me, took a bottle of rose, and held it out as if daring me to grab it. Twice I played her daft game, failing on both occasions to reach it. She backed out of the shop, opened the bottle, poured it all onto the pavement, then legged it.

  

       Alas, dealing with jakeys not only causes you to lose your faith in humanity, it also may result in you doubting the effectiveness of the boys in blue. One weekend, I noticed a couple of jakeys had crashed out side by side on a pallet next to the shop. Across the street was a restaurant, where families would sit outside. Remembering that drunk nuisances used to be dealt with swiftly, I reported them to the police. The officers who visited simply looked annoyed with me, and told me that there was no law against being drunk. A fine example for the children across the street then.

       So, that’s the meaning of Jakey Season. I’d think long and hard before leaving your door open.  

The Wines of Utiel-Requena

Somewhere near Darlington, as the 'quieter coach' began to fill up with youngsters who used the word like a lot, I asked myself if the train journey south was really worth it. It ultimately took six hours and two changes to reach Kings Cross. When I arrived I hit the nearest pub and drained a bottle of Fuller's London Porter as if my life depended on it.

 

London, on a fine day in March

I'm very interested in Spanish wine, though, so the prospect of learning about Utiel-Requena, a little-known region, appealed to me. I have a number of people and businesses to thank for this enthusiasm: my uncle, for introducing me to sherry; Majestic Wine, for sending me to Rioja; Ramón Bilbao, for holding its Spanish Wine Master competition two years ago.

 

Utiel-Requena is inland from Valencia in eastern Spain. Rather incredibly, it turns out that the United Kingdom is the top export market for this D.O.'s wines. In my experience it's rare to find a customer who's heard of Jumilla, let alone Utiel-Requena. As a speaker at the tasting in London pointed out, however, a supermarket here stocks a dirt-cheap wine from the area, which no doubt goes some way to explaining this apparent anomaly. Patricia Álvarez of Coviñas, the biggest cooperative in the region, remarked that many drinkers will be 'unaware' that they are consuming a wine from this part of Spain.

 

It's somewhat more likely that wine drinkers will have heard of the grape Bobal, which accounts for about two thirds of plantings in Utiel-Requena. Still, it's not exactly a household name. Bobal is used to make reds and trendy rosados which have very little colour. The reds might be blended with Tempranillo, Garnacha or French varietals like Merlot, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon, but it's often bottled on its own. The classic flavour of Bobal, I was told, is raspberry, and wines made from very old vines can have a liquorice character.

 

Bobal and Cabernet Sauvignon seem like odd bedfellows to me. Its thick skins give Bobal plenty of tannin, and it has a nice streak of acidity and plenty of body as well. Like Cabernet, then, it's not lacking structure, so why blend them? Tempranillo, the Spanish superstar grape, is a more logical partner because of its low acidity, and it has the advantage of being easy to grow. 

 

Given the heat and arid nature of the climate (less than 300mm of rain fell in 2024), it's a little surprising that about a quarter of the wine sold from the D.O. is white. The white grapes in Utiel-Requena benefit from elevation, with vineyards planted between about 650 and 900 metres above sea level. Aromatic whites are made from a grape called Tardana, which is indigenous to the area. Remarkably, it is the last grape to be picked at Coviñas, at the end of October or even in November. It has lovely aromas of tropical fruit and citrus.

 

The principal white grape is Macabeo. Best known for its role in Cava and white Rioja, I discovered that it is originally from the vast area of La Mancha, to the west. As Sébastien Richard of Sierra Norte observed, Macabeo is often considered to be 'quite neutral'. Some skin contact makes a big difference, he continued, resulting in more floral wines. Disappointingly, that's a tasting note I can almost never pick up, unless it's a Gewurztraminer.

 

Curiously, Albariño and Godello have migrated south from Galicia and are present in Utiel-Requena, where they seem thoroughly out of place, at least to me. Apparently, Godello suffers more than its fellow Galician varietal from the lack of rain. Albariño manages to retain its high acidity, which was also true of the Sauvignon Blancs I sampled. Chardonnay is also present, in fact it's the second most prevalent white grape. Needless to say, it's useful in the local Cavas, adding a creamy texture.

 

Utiel-Requena has some things going for it. The wines are good and shockingly cheap, and it's a hotbed of organic viticulture. It may sound laughable, but I think the main challenge it faces is not drought, but its name. Utiel-Requena really is a bit of a mouthful. That said, if Montepulciano can achieve name recognition among Brits, there's hope for this this Spanish D.O. too.

 

Cairanne

             Several months ago I spent about forty pounds on a bottle of Guigal's Châteauneuf du Pape blanc. I almost never spend that much on a bottle of wine, especially a white, so I had to ask myself: what was I thinking? Well, the fact is that I have a soft spot for the whites of that region.

 

Before I entered the wine trade, I took a backpack to the southern Rhône. I had already developed a liking for the area’s powerful and intoxicating red wines, so I decided to spend some time there, relying on public transport and my own two feet. It was high summer and the weather was glorious.

 

After visiting the attractive hillside wine village of Séguret, I walked several miles across the plain to my destination, Rasteau, in the middle of a roasting August afternoon. My route was complicated by the presence of the River Ouvèze, so I ended up going the long way via Roaix, a Côtes du Rhône named village which you almost never see on a label, at least in the U.K. I wrote the following in my notebook after that crazy trek:

 

Walk from Séguret to Roaix intolerable. Heat appalling, barely a breath of wind. Vines stretch across the flat land; gobelet, wires. Lots of canopy, big bunches of grapes. Hotel guy told me it hadn’t rained for two weeks; previous downpour was a violent thunderstorm.

 

Sweating buckets, I stopped at a roadside inn outside Roaix. It might have been wiser to order a Perrier or a Badoit, but I opted for a glass of 'vin blanc' instead. I don’t remember what it was, probably a Côtes du Rhône, but that was my memorable introduction to the whites of the southern Rhône.

 

After reaching my destination, I discovered that white AOC Rasteau was not a thing, that honour being reserved for Grenache-heavy reds and Vins Doux Naturel. Neighbouring Cairanne made whites, though, so I decided to go there. 

 

I recommend that any energetic lover of wines from the southern Rhône should undertake the walk between those two villages. You ascend a hill behind Rasteau, past row upon stony row of vines. Eventually you reach the top of ‘La Montagne’, which is actually only about 350 metres high, from which point you can see the ‘vieux village’ of Cairanne on a nearby hilltop. It’s a lovely walk, and if you undertake it in August when all the farmers are on holiday, the only sounds you’ll hear will be from cicadas, mosquitos and the occasional passing helicopter.

Cairanne

 

I got chatting to a wine merchant in the modern part of Cairanne, below the old hilltop village. White wine, he told me, was more important than red before phylloxera. Not anymore, of course! Still, whites are taken seriously in Cairanne, whose wines apparently have more acidity than those made in neighbouring villages. When I asked why this should be, I was given the rather enigmatic explanation that the soil and ‘terroir’ were responsible. I say enigmatic, because the soil and terroir seemed very similar to Rasteau’s to me: marl, clay, sand, an abundance of stones, all in a very warm and dry climate.

 

        I was curious about the grapes used in the blend, for they were not exactly household words, at least to an inexperienced British drinker. Grenache Blanc, he told me, was neutral, but had body. Bourboulenc was also quite neutral, but brought acidity, a rare thing in the southern Rhône. The flavour came from Clairette, which now has the caché of being the principal grape used in white Gigondas. For some reason, Roussanne didn’t merit a mention, perhaps because it was originally from the northern Rhône! At the time, I had little familiarity with these varietals, so I was fascinated.

 

I never made it to Châteauneuf du Pape, unfortunately. It turned out that the southern Rhône shares one of the U.K.’s deficiencies: you can’t rely on local buses. As for why I’m keen on whites from Cairanne, Lirac, Vacqueyras and so on, I think I have to acknowledge that, most importantly, they remind me of that beautiful region. I might even drink a rosé from there.

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