A Great Choice of Spanish Wines in Mayfair
Well, in Spain at least, they built roads, aqueducts and amphitheatres – and, perhaps more importantly to us here in 2024 – they introduced wine making. In fact, by the second century AD, Rome had worked its way through 20 million amphorae of Spanish wine, which is going some even for Romans.
During the Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula from 718 to 1492, Christian communities in what is now Spain were allowed to continue producing and selling wine, which is interesting. Production increased steadily after the Moors were vanquished. And after Franco’s death in 1975 the industry boomed with the technological revolution that followed the introduction of stainless steel.
The result is that today Spain has as many as 600 native grape varieties, although major producers tend to concentrate on about a fifth of those. Even so, with 70 wine regions and a startling variety of terroir, the wine is so good that the Spanish hardly ever touch foreign wine – consumption is at less than a third of one percent.
What did the Romans ever do for us?
The best known grape, of course, is tempranillo (which some say is related to pinot noir), and the most famous Spanish wine region is Rioja – one of only two regions to have been granted the coveted DOCa classification, signifying wines of real quality produced over a long time.
The French had quite a hand in Rioja’s success – French winemakers fled to Rioja on the other side of the Pyrenees to escape the Great French Wine Blight of the mid 19th century (caused by an American aphid that laid waste to the vineyards in France). Until then, Rioja had largely produced white wines.
It would take a book to do justice to the story of Spanish wine. But a good place to start is Wine Uncorked by Fred Sirieix – he of First Dates and Gordon, Gino & Fred. One of Fred’s favourite restaurants is El Pirata in Mayfair’s Down street, and actually that’s not a bad place to start if you want to understand Spanish wine – it has an amazing 140 of them on its list.
