Once a month I gather with cooks, servers and managers from Oliveto, Chez Panisse, Eccolo, Adagia, Boulette’s Larder, Salt House and beyond, as well as business school grads, lawyers, physical therapists, and people from the non profit sector to taste wine and share food. The common thread is that everyone who attends wants to learn more about different flavors of the world. This month we focussed on the northeast corner of Spain: Catalunya. In Spain, there are 65 official growing sub-regions (Denominaciones de Orígen D.O.). Catalunya is home to eleven of those. Each district has its own rules for how to produce the wine, which grapes to include and which alcohol range that is allowed.
The wine districts of Catalonia:
- D.O. Alella
- D.O. Empordà
- D.O. Catalunya
- D.O. Conca de Barberá
- D.O. Costers del Segre
- D.O. Montsant
- D.O. Penedes
- D.O. Pla de Bages
- D.O.Q Priorat
- D.O. Tarragona
- D.O. Terra Alta
Last night we tried wines from Priorat, Montsant and Catalunya, most of them red, because red wine varietals are more widely planted in the region. The common grapes of the area are Grenache, Carignan, Cabernet Sauvignon, Tempranillo (Ull de Lebre), Merlot and Syrah. My personal favorite was a Giné Giné wine made of grenache and carignan. The wine was straight forward and silky, with enough interest to encourage another sip. The other reds we tried also had fairly expressive fruit, were slightly jammy, and treated in some percentage of new or neutral oak. The less than interesting wines were disjunct and aggressive.
Among the whites, we drank the Can Feixes, a blend of 39% Parellada, 27% Macabeo, 24% Chardonnay and 10% Malvasia. The wine was delicious, slightly oily, with hints of lemon peel and sage. We also tried a wine from Odysseus, made with Pedro Ximenez, a fascinating grape normally limited to sherry country in the south of Spain. In Priorat where Silvia (the wine maker) grows it, it is neither fortified nor sweet. Rather, it is bone dry, crisp, slightly bitter, full in body, and layered.
After trying a number of wines from Catalunya (around 12 different bottles), I do not have a distinct flavor profile or understanding of the terroir of the region. For the most part, the wine tasted like wine that could have grown in Argentina, other parts of Spain, certain vineyards in France, or California. Perhaps we didn’t get deep enough in to the producers and particularities of the various hills, slopes, soils and so on. Have other people noticed distinct, marked characteristics for that region? For those of you who attended the dinner, did you walk away with a stronger sense of place for Catalunya?
1 Comment
April 16, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I think you sum up the limitations of the region very well. I was looking forward to getting a better sense of the variety of wines from Catalonia that certainly didn’t happen. Clearly it has been Parkerized. It is significant that out of the 12 bottles we tasted, only 3 of the 11 DOs in Catalonia were represented, w/ the majority coming from Priorat. Parker has been raving about Priorat for a while now and this has effected the availability and marketing of wines from Catalonia, the homogenous taste profile of the wines, and the huge capital infusion into the region that we witnessed when we were there last year. All of the vines in the Priorat region are relatively young which also might play into the lack of variety.
Our experience w/ Alsace was a stark contrast. The taste profile for those wines was varied and amazingly broad, not only across varietals but also within wines from the same grape. Germany posing as France is certainly not as sexy as the Costa Del Sol and maybe this promotes more interesting wine making.
I agree that the most interesting wine on we tasted was the Can Feixes from penedes. At $13 it’s a great bottle of wine and will be great for the coming summer months. At that price I think it’s only matched by the Albarino from Valminor.