Spanish wine

The history of wine in Spain is so ancient that no one really knows who brought the first vines to the region. By the time the Phoenicians arrived some 3,000 years ago and founded the present-day cities of Cádiz and Jerez, viticulture was well established and Spanish wines were widely traded throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa.

Spain could be called a wine miracle. After years of being on the fringes of the fine wine world, it is now a major player. Investment and ambition in vineyards and wineries are resulting in increasingly rich, complex (often very alcoholic) and spicy reds that are increasingly appreciated by international consumers.

Boasting more land devoted to grapes than any other country, Spain is only just beginning to capitalize on this resource in a coherent way. Spain is a haphazard jumble of regions and subregions, just as its landscape is a haphazard jumble of incredibly raw landscapes. A glance at a map reveals the climatic diversity among Spain’s many wine regions, from the soggy green vineyards of Galicia on the northern Atlantic coast to the toasty vineyards of the southeastern Mediterranean. Spain’s saving grace, in terms of viticulture, is the average altitude of its vineyards, which is over 2,000 feet. Many of Spain’s vineyards thus manage to produce grapes of good color and acidity simply because nighttime temperatures are relatively low and the grapes don’t ripen until the end of a sufficiently long growing season.

But there is a real treasure to be found for those willing to dig, and now that a class of connoisseurs has developed in Spain, all sorts of ambitious investors have done their part to change the image of Spanish wine. Today, a new generation of winemakers has quietly begun to make spectacular wines and experiment with grape varieties that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Wine remains an important commodity and an integral part of Spanish culture.