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.
