Greg,
Thanks for all of the kind comments - totally appreciated. But the question is - what did you think of the Grenache Blanc, my friend?
Cheers.
I zipped through all of the responses and didn’t see the D.O. of Terra Alta mentioned. It lies just south of Montsant and the specialty is Garnacha Blanca. I didn’t encounter too many of them in the 5 years I covered Spain but among the wines I did taste, there were some amazing values, superior QPR. Check it out.
DoctorJay
Yep. That’s a pretty interesting region. They have more Garnacha blanca than anywhere else in the world and it was for years and pretty much still is their signature grape. They have been producing wine for over a thousand years, but they’re still undiscovered for the most part, much like their neighbor Priorat was until the 1990s.
Largely that’s because they made such crappy wine for so long. Under Franco there were a few co-ops there, like so many other places in Spain, and they just drank the wine locally as it was hard to get into commerce and really not worth trying to.
But they have some interesting stuff.
They made the Garnacha blanca with skins, basically an orange wine. Those are the brisados, as opposed to the virgenes, which are made like most other whites without skins. A lot of the wine in the past was oxidized, which seems to be a problem with that grape - maybe Larry can chime in as I don’t know.
Of course today, with the attention paid to places like Jura, people are looking at those lesser-known regions and oxidized wine and are re-examining the old traditions. So there are a few producers who are making really good wine there, but like always, you have to look hard. Since nobody knows them, and the families have generally had the properties for a while, there are some great values. The best wines come from the highest hills, although the entire place is pretty elevated. The high hills are quite windy and dry.
The other local grapes are the Cava grapes - Macabeo, or Viura, and Parellada, which can be made into a pretty good, crisp wine, and I generally preferred it when I got a good example. I’m not aware of Garnacha blanca being made into Cava and I never really asked about it, but now I’m kind of curious as to why they didn’t really use it and I’m thinking it had to do with the fact that maybe it just didn’t keep the acidity in the other Cava regions. No real idea though - that’s just speculation.