SPANISH WINES IN A TRADITIONAL STYLE

Nowadays it's easy to pick a wine from Spain with a more approachable style. Luscious forward fruit, nice oak integration, good balance, and tannins that, once aged, sit beautifully on the palate. These are great wines and very affordable, but I have started to see an increase in people trying to find Spanish wines with a taste profile of a more traditional style.

It seems people are looking for something a bit, dare I say it, "rustic". A traditional wine will have thinner fruit concentration, it will have harsher tannins, it will be aged in larger old oak barrels and the grapes will be harvested earlier before full ripeness. A wine of a traditional style will seem dull and thin to the majority of wine lovers. These wines are likely to be medium body with less concentration; a wine that you can even smell and maybe taste the winery as well as the terroir; a more earthy wine, with fruit that is more stewed than juicy; sometimes the wine shows some herbal and tea tones the older they get as the fruit disappears and the earth, wood and tobacco takes over.

Personally, I love these wines, but they can be difficult to understand. Lovers of these wines say they have soul, and new modern wines are boring. I'm a relatively recent wine lover and sometimes I can find them too different for my palate and I crave for more fruit. The majority of my first wines were mostly new world which is a vastly different style.

If you are like me and are looking to experience wines of this style then I suggest looking at the Ribera del Duero region. They're not that easy to find so I recommend starting with our own bodega (winery) Valduero. This bodega delivers wines that are a mix of traditional and more modern styles. One particular wine I tasted recently has both taste profiles; a beautiful experience. The wine has been aged for a total of 6 years consisting of 3 years in new Canadian and French oak and 3 years in the bottle before release. It was the Valduero 1999 6 Anos! The wine shows modern styles with its dark ruby colour, supple fruity palate, black currents and black berries plus a traditional feeling of damp earth tones, tobacco and cedar wood. The flavours even mature in the mouth as you drink and enjoying it with a rack of lamb is truly amazing.

The wines from Valduero range from the modern fruit forward entry levels of Arbucala for drinking young through to the Gran Reserva with a mix of traditional and modern styles, suitable for drinking from 10 years old.

The Valduero 6 Anos and Valduero 12 Anos display the history of Ribera del Duero in a bottle. I highly recommend them for that traditional style made in a modern Bodega.

Once you taste a Valduero wine you can tell they are definitely an honest bodega trying to keep with tradition in viticulture and vinification, but seem to use the modern methods with caution and care, this will show through once you try the wine



Lee Watson.



Lee Watson is Sales Manager with Saveurs International (Asia) Limited.