Home › Blogs › rich's blog

The Secret of Castilla - La Mancha's Potent Terroir

Sat, 07/14/2012 - 14:56 — rich

On Tuesday, June 10, 2012 the Castilla - La Mancha Road Show presented a seminar in San Francisco for the wine trade and media professionals, to infuse the audience with a clearer understanding about the advantages that this terroir brings to the many varietals that are grown and vinified in this 9 DOC-growing region of central Spain.   Parenthetically,  Castilla - La Mancha produces about the same volume of wine each year as California.

Karen MacNeil, author of The Wine Bible, and highly-regarded wine educator/tour director, made a presentation that got to the heart of the matter in short order. 

Ms. MacNeil told us that Castilla - La Mancha has two very special advantages over most other large growing regions of the world:
  • more hours of luminance throughout the growing season
  • more intervals of relaxation from the warmth of the day brought about by the cool evening throughout the longer growing season.

She said "Complexity, as it happens, for a grape to develop nuance requires an incrementally slow march to ripeness ... you can end up anywhere, but the longer that it takes to get there, the better.  Long growing seasons, especially long growing seasons with huge amounts of luminosity (as opposed to heat, per se) are fantastic.  That's how these wines get to some measure of complexity... by the virtue of a long growing season which can only be possible with cold nights".  The high altitude combined with the lower latitude of the Iberian Peninsula also contribute to the natural advantages in having the right balance of temperature ranges and longer hours of sunny skies in the growing season.

Throughout the majority of the afternoon, the guests visited with 27 bodegas, consultants, and export managers, tasting the wines of Castilla - La Mancha, and digging into the common thread of how this terroir enables so many fine varietals to excel and to outperform in their characteristics that may otherwise result when they are grown in other wine grape producing regions of the world.

I look for the special cases where a grower produces better fruit of a particular varietal than that which she or he would otherwise have accomplished in another DOC, growing region, or country.  I also look for cases where a winemaker has upgraded the quality of wine that can be made from a varietal which is more frequently treated as a "structure grape", and typically blended in very small shares into more popular varietals because so little of it is grown in the DOC or AVA.

In this edition of the Castilla - La Mancha Road Show, there were at least a few extraordinary examples of winemakers excelling in this way.  One such stellar producer is Bodegas Piqueras, which makes more than 2 million bottles per year in the Almansa appellation.  Many of their wines outperform traditional expectations.  On the evening of July 13, 2012, my wife and I made a good sized dent in a bottle of their Castillo de Almansa Colección 2011 Garnacha Tintorera.  We paired it with a stewed boneless leg of lamb.

The specifications for this GT are worth a quick overview.

Grown in Almansa, jacked-out, and selected with uncompromising care before arriving at the press, it becomes a hugely aromatic and flavorful wine grape, blessed with berries, cherries, and minerality with a very long palate.  It is inexpensive throughout the world, wherever it might be found.

In France, Garnacha Tintorera is known as Alicante Bouschet, which is the lovechild of Petit Bouschet and Grenache.  It travels by many names, such as Alikant Bushe Ekstrafertil, Aragones,  Bojadiserka, Carignan Jaune,  Pe de Perdiz, and Rouvaillard (to mention a few).

Winemakers like the deep dark color that it adds as a blending grape, but haven't had the sort of terroir that brings out the best of its' aromas and flavor profile.  You will enjoy its' profile in Wikipedia 

Spain, as well as a few other places, produces Graciano, Petit Verdot, Robles, Bobal and many others much more effectively, economically, and in higher quality than the rest-of-the-world.  We'll get into more case studies in the near future, as I have been researching my palate off.

The real hell of the matter is that this, like many great wines, cannot be found in our neighborhoods, metros, and states because importers have not been adequately persuaded that consumers would buy such wines if they were introduced to their territories.  We face the problem of the Chicken and The Egg.  It's sad that so many fine wines and great consumers are not being brought together.  

Let's be the change.

I will be creating, producing and hosting consumer tasting panels to experiment with fine wines such as this, in livestream taste-ups with different groups throughout the globe, and accompanied in conversation with other consumers and with the winemakers through Skype and similar devices.  The purpose of such exercises is to generate enough consumer awareness, brand recognition and appreciation so that the stationary inertial momentum of importers, distributors, and retailers can be overcome, and that this unfortunate situation turned around.

You want to be involved?  Is your winery making the level of effort that it takes to get proper distribution in the U.S. and elsewhere?  Are consumers passing your brand by when they walk through the aisles of the markets or drive through wine country?  It doesn't have to be that way.  We can change things.  Write to me, rich@vinebuzz.biz.