Fringe Spain is monthly class series hosted at Tin Parlour, a conservas wine bar in the East Village, on Tuesday, March 26th, 2024. Tickets for “Cava Country” on Thursday, May 23 are available here.
In the third volume of our ongoing series exploring the places where ‘Spanish wine’ frays at the edges, we tasted one grape across a rainbow of colors: GARNATXA.
Grenache—grenache, garnatxa, potato, potahto—was born in Aragon*, but this country kid got to see the world from the decks of Catalan merchant ships during its 13th-century golden age. Now it’s synonymous with the sun-drenched, often blended red wines of the western Mediterranean, popping up everywhere from Châteauneuf to Sicily.
It can be white and pink and purple and fuzzy, cheap and cheerful or some of the most expensive high threadcount silk you’ve ever drunk. It’s a grape that, for complicated reasons, I used to kind of hate — and now kind of love. (One big reason? This region.)
See below for details on what we tasted, and some questions to ask if you go drinking too.
* probably! Sardinians, who call it cannonau and still have a Catalan-speaking former merchant colony in their northwest, claim it as their own. At the end of the day, while I’m open to it having traveled in either direction, it spread where it did because of that trading empire, whether it was taken to the island or taken from it.
Here’s how our lineup might look on a wine list:
FINCA CASA BALAGUER, garnacha “La Rambla del Peligrés” 2019 ALICANTE
VINYES TORTUGA, garnacha “Hunky Dory” EMPORDÀ
4 MONOS, garnacha, garnacha blanca, cariñena “Cien Lanzas” GREDOS (CENECIENTOS)
DANIEL RAMOS, garnacha “El Altar” 2018 GREDOS (CEBREROS)
FRISACH, garnatxa gris “Les Alifares” COBERA D’EBRE
LA SALADA, garnatxa blanca “La Barraca de l’Avi” PENEDÈS
JAUMA, grenache “Like Raindrops” ADELAIDE
Questions to ask while you taste
- Grenache loves sun and ripeness. How do alcohol, body, and texture play out in these wines? Are there choices producers are making to find freshness in hot places? How does the warmth of that alcohol ripeness change the way you relate to the wines bodily? How they relate to food?
- Two of these wines are differently-colored grenache subtypes — white and pink — treated the same way as red wines (fermented on the skins). How is their texture, aromatic profile, and weight similar to — or different from — grenache noir / garnacha tinta?
- Do you have expectations around grenache, where it comes from, how it’s made, or what it tastes like? Do these wines meet or challenge those expectations? Which of these wines felt more classic? Which more adventurous or esoteric?
- All of these wines are made from the same grape variety. Were there commonalities to each of these wines that said, this is the grenache talking! to you? Were there times that winemaking choices, or regionality, seemed to speak louder?
A little more detail
FINCA CASA BALAGUER, garnacha “La Rambla del Peligrés” 2019 ALICANTE
Who made it? Andres Carull and Marta Ribera, in a little industrial town, Villena. They bought the estate from Rafa Bernarbe, the father of natural wine in Valencia, who retired with health issues around a decade ago—Andres was a local and worked with him, and managed to scrape together the money to buy it. The estate itself dates back to the 18th century (that’s the casa called Balaguer)—finca also means ‘domaine’ or ‘farm’ or ‘estate’, so the name kind of means….’house-house’.
From where? A named site (“rambla del peligrés”), half destemmed and half whole cluster without any crushing, bottled without sulfur.
From where? Alicante, also one of grenache’s old synonyms, in Mediterranean Spain, south down the coast from Valencia.
VINYES TORTUGA, garnacha “Hunky Dory” EMPORDÀ
Who made it? Dido and Jurriaan, globe-trotting partners from Amsterdam who spent a half decade making wine everywhere from Swartland to Montsant to to Colchagua Valey before working with OG Catalan natural winemaker Joan Escoda at Escoda Sanahuja in 2016—and that’s where they ended up staying. Today, they farm a little under 10 hectares of vines, and they just opened a little restaurant attached to a neighboring cellar.
Out of what? Garnacha with a very light touch: carbonic for just 5 days and then pressed into amphora to finish fermenting and age through the winter.
From where? Empordà, a tiny region nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees, rugged mountain country overlooking the Mediterranean.
4 MONOS, garnacha, garnacha blanca, cariñena “Cien Lanzas” GREDOS (CENECIENTOS)
Who made it? “Four monkeys”: Javier and Laura García (Javier was the head winemaker at Bodegas Jiménez-Landi, the family winery of the guy who ended up being one of the two guys behind Comando G, this region’s fanciest producer), as well as two Davids, Moreno and Velasco. They’re all local to the region, and made their first vintage together in 2010. Over the years, they’ve acquired 5 hectares of vines they work themselves as well as buying from another 5 hectares farmed by local growers.
Out of what? Old vine garnacha, with a little bit of cariñena and garnacha blanca, from plots around the village of Cenicientos, fermented whole-cluster and aged in large neutral cask.
From where? Cenicientos is in Gredos, a mountain range west of Madrid which importer José Pastor describes as “a holy collision between the Mediterranean and the Alpine.” Read more about Gredos in its atlas entry.
DANIEL RAMOS, garnacha “El Altar” 2018 GREDOS (CEBREROS)
Who made it? Daniel Ramos, who worked all over the world before helping a guy named Telmo Rodríguez found Pegaso in 1999, one of the first wineries that would be part of the rebirth of Gredos, and after buying some vines started his own independent project in 2010.
Out of what? Old vines from a single plot named ‘La Riconada’, mostly grenache with a splash of a white table grape, ‘chelva’, that disappears into bulk blends from Extremadura to Granada.
From where? Cebreros, a village of Gredos, a landscape in central Spain that Miguel de Unamuno described as “the roof of Castilla and the stone heart of Spain.” Read more about Gredos in its atlas entry.
FRISACH, garnatxa gris “Les Alifares” COBERA D’EBRE
Who made it? Brothers Francesc and Joan Ferré. (Frisach was their great-grandfather’s surname, and the family home still bears the name Ca Frisach). Their family were historically grape and olive farmers, but they’d always sold their fruit. In 2009, a larger buyer cancelled the purchase at the last moment, and Francesc and Joan decided to make wine from their own grapes for the first time.
Out of what? Organically farmed vernatxa gris (aka grenache gris, a pink-skinned grenache variant) from a 3-hectare vineyard called “La Serra,” planted in 1955 at 1500-ft. elevation on petrified sand dunes. Fermented on the skins (like red wine!). Ends up the color of rose gold or coral.
From where? Terra Alta—specifically Corbera d’Ebre, on the border between Aragón and Tarragona. The region is small, and grenache in all of its colors and guises (blanc, gris, fina, peluda) dominates; 3/4 of Spain’s garnacha blanca is here. It’s a high-elevation inland plateau shielded from the coast by a mountain range, a dramatic landscape that was a favorite of Picasso’s, and the site of the longest and bloodiest battle of the Spanish Civil War, with a landscape reshaped by five months of static trench warfare and artillery bombardment. For more on wines from here, see recaps for a previous season, “Summer Vacation(s): Catalunya.”
LA SALADA, garnatxa blanca “La Barraca de l’Avi” PENEDÈS
Who made it? Toni Carbó. Toni’s great-grandfather lived in a farmhouse called ‘La Salada’. His grandfather was able to scrape together money to buy land of his own and plant vines. Like a lot of members of the new wave of natural winegrowers in his region, Toni comes from a line of grape growers, but is the first in the family to bottle his own wine rather than selling the grapes to the cava merchants.
Out of what? Garnatxa blanca, fermented on the skins in amphora and aged in a mix of steel tank and demijohn (small glass globes).
From where? Penedès, the river valleys across the coastal range from Barcelona, and the heart of cava country.
JAUMA, grenache “Like Raindrops” ADELAIDE
Who made it? James Erskine, who along with Anton von Klopper (Lucy Margaux) and Tom Shobbrock was part of the early wave of Australian natural wine — they used to road trip together as a threesome and pour wine out of an amphora sealed with olive oil.
Out of what? Grenache from three different vineyards, destemmed, fermented on the skins and aged in tank, bottled without filtration or sulfur.
From where? McLaren Vale and Clarendon, just inland of Adelaide in South Australia, a place that’s a nexus for some of the most light-touch, minimalist, idiosyncratic wines in the country. (If your only reference points for Aussie wine are Yellowtail and Penfolds Grange, this will blow your mind!)
Children's Atlas of Wine 