Wine club - Roger Scruton delves deep into Spain
Published 20 June 2005
From granite slopes in Bierzo, a brooding, bitter-sweet love song
In 1921, Jose Ortega y Gasset published Espana invertebrada, prophesying the decline of his country as it lost the customs that had placed honour above pleasure in the Spanish heart. Ortega died in 1955, just as the barbarian invasions were beginning, and so had no opportunity to compare the effect of consumerism on Spaniards with its effect on the British who were raping and pillaging the length of the coast. Still, we must take Ortega's word for it and assume that the Spaniards have declined to their present condition from a state of dignified dutifulness, and that the futile chivalry of Don Quixote once typified their national character.
However, it is true of Spain as it is of England, that the old virtues can still be discovered, hidden in unvisited valleys and expressed in the age-old activities, such as haymaking, horse-shoeing and hound-breeding, through which our neighbours survive from day to day. I know people who have traipsed across Spain in search of those dried-olive characters that Ortega cherished, and I have listened credulously to their reports. In like spirit, Corney & Barrow has sniffed the Iberian peninsula for the spirit of the soil, and readers should be grateful for the result, offered through this month's wine club. For Spain, like Britain, abounds in sequestered valleys, sheltered from the global locust storms, where sturdy old vines suck the rocky undersoil and grapes fill with the taste of revenge.
Foremost among these unvisited regions is Bierzo, in north-west Spain, where the local Mencia grape clings to steep granite slopes from which many a donkey has crashed to its death in the ravines below. The Palacios family has acquired a batch of terraced vineyards from the wizened old geezers who wore
their Spanish virtue to the knuckle in tending these cliffs, and has
applied their expertise to produce a wine that is rich in minerals, with a blood-dark colour and brooding taste, like a bitter-sweet love song of Lorca. This highly individual wine is proof that there is more to Spanish red than Rioja. For the risk-averse, however, Rioja remains the safer choice, and the excellent Solar de Samaniego has been provided to reassure them.
Comparable in finesse to the Bierzo is the Veigadares from the
Rias Baixas region of Galicia. Spanish whites seldom achieve full
fruit and golden depth without becoming shut in by walls of oak
and tied up in kinky leather. Yet this wine, made from the native Albarino grape, is sunny and serene, with a flavour of peaches and a sea-breeze aroma: surely the most lovely of Spanish whites. The other white comes, like Bierzo, from the hills of north-west Spain, and is a floral, acidic wine that we drank with Sam the horse. It recalled Ortega's other great book La caza y los toros, devoted to Sam's forbidden pleasure.
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