Archive

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JR's notes:

RED OR WHITE is a specialist wine supplement published along with the OFF-LICENCE NEWS. This is an off-trade oriented overview of how Spanish wine is perceived by the public and which sectors seem likel;y to be poised for growth. It was published in November, 2000. OFF-LICENCE NEWS is published by William Reed, of Crawley, Sussex, whose website is at www.williamreed.co.uk/foodand drink

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SPAIN - FIGHTING BACK

Prices are up, sales are down, but are the winemakers of Spain despondent? Quite the reverse, discovers John Radford.

It's never quite what it seems when you're number-crunching statistics. On the face of it, Spanish wine had a bad year in 1999, even taking a dip in the on-trade where it had been growing quietly (if slowly) for five years or more, but the drop is almost entirely in one sector - Rioja. More of that in a moment. Wine-drinking, at home and in bars and restaurants, is still on the increase across the board, although growth isn't anything like it was a few years ago. We seem to have reached a plateau with a gentle upward slope, and this conceals two factors which are very important.

The first of these is the tendency for wine-drinkers to become more discerning. The value of wines imported - from all over the world - is increasing faster than the quantity, which implies that we're all drinking a smaller quantity of better-quality wine: this is good for the business and probably better for the health in the long term.

The second is the ever-expanding choice we have in these islands: Chile had barely got going before Argentina stuck the end of a crowbar into the market; Uruguay, Mexico and Brazil are showing signs of something more than interesting and, while our heads are turned to the west, the old Soviet-bloc producers of eastern Europe are creeping up behind us storming into the market: Bulgaria trying to recapture its early lead, Hungary producing a staggering array of wines, brilliantly marketed and at eye-popping prices.

What does this mean for Spanish wine? Well, the bugbear here is the eternal price-point - the something-plus-99p that supermarketeers believe will blind us to the fact that £4.99 and a fiver are the same thing (nothing new here, of course - some of us still remember buying shirts for 39/11d)...

...Which brings us back to Rioja. There were still plenty of producers willing to supply the supermarket trade to match the £3.99 price-point and this accounted for a biggish chunk of the export trade. The wines were, of course, at best bog-standard and mostly the kind of slightly-dodgy stuff which does nothing to enhance the reputation of the region as a whole (this is a widespread problem - have you tried any generic Bordeaux recently?). Rioja producers who were and are really trying to make something happen heaved a sigh of relief that their wine had moved up a notch, but this was small consolation to the co-ops who lost their market after allowing their members to demand unrealistically-high prices for grapes in advance of the 1999 vintage. The price collapsed in the spring of 2000 and reality returned, but the £3.99 market had gone and the co-ops were left with the prospect of selling on to the big companies, who were quietly content to be able to buy-in wines at rea sonable prices again.

But Spain is more than Rioja, of course, and the vast majority of regions have made modest but measurable progress over the past several years. The big winner has been Cava, which seems to increase its share of the sparkling-wine market regardless of what's happening elsewhere - and equally regardless of the fulminations of 'expert' wine-writers who consider it to be an accursèd blasphemy against the blessèd Champagne and write endless ranting articles about how perfectly-awful Cava is. Fortunately, the fizz-buying public is more pragmatic and buys what it likes and can afford. That's how Cava increased by 30% (summer '98 vs summer '99) when the whole fizz market increased by 20% (ditto). Supermarket own-label is the bulk of the business, true, but there are more low-volume small-scale Cavas coming on to the market year by year as well, and many of them sell at premium prices.

The most high-profile flag-carriers for Spain tend to be the niche-market, small-production wines made by maverick winemakers who seem to price their product by adding VAT to their telephone number, and then restricting sales to fifty cases per export customer. They normally sell out about a fortnight after the bottling-run, and examples include Clos L'Ermita from Alvaro Palacios in Priorato, Dominio de Pingus from Peter Sisseck in Ribera del Duero and Cirsión from Roda in Rioja. There are others, some from the most (apparently) unpromising regions and these are likely to be the prominent faces of top-flight Spanish wine in the 21st century.

A few top-level wines are, however, not going to do much for export volumes, even given their stratospheric prices. Spain's next line of defence is in regions which themselves are establishing reputations for generic excellence. Rioja may have had its latest 'upgrade' thrust upon it by market forces, but few would deny that the best of the region are still amongst Europe's finest wines.

We might divide the wine regions of Spain into three categories:

A) Areas whose names are recognised by the customer as some kind of guarantee of reliable, quality wine

A1) Areas whose regional name alone is sufficient: let's say Sherry, Cava, Rioja, Navarra, Ribera del Duero, Somontano, Penedès and Valdepeñas

A2) Areas whose regional names are known by wine buffs who actively seek them out: Rías Baixas, Rueda, Toro, Priorato, Costers del Segre, Montilla (fortified wines) and (what's left of) Málaga

A3) Areas whose regional names might be described as 'on the brink' of recognition (although many have been on the brink for several years): Ribeira Sacra (and most of the rest of Galicia), Bierzo, Cigales, Cariñena, La Mancha.

B) Areas where the name of a particular winery or producer is likely to be better-known than the regional name: Calatayud (and most of the rest of Aragón), Alella, Conca de Barberà, Tarragona (and most of the rest of Catalunya), Almansa, Vinos de Madrid, Ribera del Guadiana, Valencia (and the rest of the Levant), Jumilla and Yecla.

C) The rest - areas which have little or no profile abroad and no prominent producers.

Perhaps understandably it's those areas which are least known which are growing fastest. It seems unlikely that wines from the DOs Monte Leniscal, Pla i Llevant de Mallorca or Mondéjar will be popping up on the supermarket shelves at that ubiquitous £3.99 price-point, but there is another game afoot which has hardly begun, and it effectively bypasses the whole DO 'regional name' system.

Unashamedly borrowing from the concept of the Vin de Pays d'Oc, the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha created the Vino de la Tierra de Castilla in 1999. This offers a more lightly-regulated régime to allow maverick winemakers to plant more or less what they want where they want. The prime mover was the Marqués de Griñón, whose vineyards in the province of Toledo are, paradoxically, about to be awarded the very first 'private' DO in Spain. However, he has gone further, and has also helped to establish something called 'Pagos de Castilla' which might roughly be translated as 'domains of Castile' - recognising individual wine-estates in Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla-León whether or not they form part of an established DO or Vino de la Tierra. This took place in the summer of 2000 and no-one yet knows quite how it's going to turn out, but it seems likely that quite a few producers who feel themselves hidebound by the current regulations may be queuing up to take part.

One thing at least is certain in Spain - exports may temporarily be down but expectations are very much on the up.

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