Spain never lets me down. I love wine from all around the world and am passionate about wines from everywhere and about the countries and regions that spawn them, but I always return to my first love — Spain.
I am only in this business because of my misspent youth in Spain and the healthy relationship — I hope — that gave me to alcohol. It certainly made me like wine, but I am not sure that is entirely the same thing. Over the years I have seen huge changes in Spanish wine. Once upon a time only the reds were really good and even then only from one or two regions — principally Rioja of course.
During my 34 years in the wine business the wine revolution has spread out throughout Spain and produced startlingly good results.
Rioja has got better and better and high quality reds are now made in more and more unlikely places and the reds of the south are now at least as exciting as the more traditional regions of northern Spain. One of the really lovely things that I have noticed in Spain in recent years is the way passionate people are training as winemakers, working in the industry for a while to gain experience and then buying or renting small parcels of vines in order to craft very personal wines.
These projects are really thrilling and you can see them up and down the country, budding winemakers nurturing forgotten vineyards and coaxing them back to life — or sometimes planting them from scratch — and producing wonderfully expressive wines. In much of Spain from the s onwards big production was the thing, so the cooperatives churned out huge volumes of palatable — by local standards — wine to slake the thirst of local workers with almost no regard to quality as we would understand it today.
