Odd region, Ribera del Duero. A plateau over 2500 feet above sea level, enduring blisteringly hot days and frosty nights, this is not the first place one would choose to grow grapes. Yet since the 1860s it has produced Spain’s most prestigious wine. Vega Sicilia is a blend of Tinto Fino – the local name for the Tempranillo grape – and Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec. Recent vintages cost around $400 a bottle.

You might suppose that so renowned a wine would have encouraged a horde of local imitators, as Biondi-Santi did with Brunello di Montalcino. But there have been no Vega Sicilia copycats, and until comparatively recently the Duero valley remained a backwater. This all changed in the 1970s, thanks largely to one man, Alejandro Fernandez. His Pesquera, a 100% Tinto Fino, changed the region’s fortunes. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been brooding on the question of wine and national character. One must reflect the other, but how, exactly? This seems impossible to nail down. For example, Americans like powerful wines with concentrated fruit flavours. They also like baseball, SUVs and hot dogs. Is there a common factor? I really cannot see one. Yet all these things are expressions of the same national taste.

The problem is even worse with Spain. As everyone knows, this country has lately been transformed. Once it was a nation of sleepy, backward, blatantly corrupt, Roman Catholic bigots. Now it is a nation of hyperactive, ultra-modern, discreetly corrupt, left-wing neurotics. We would expect this transformation to be somehow reflected in the country’s wine, would we not?

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