The Magnificent Seven: The Ribeira Sacra Producers of The Spanish Artisan Wine Group

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Jorge Carneros and Emmanuel Dupuy D'Angeac tasting Viña Cazoga in the winery in Ribeira Sacra. Carnero means ram, so a ram's head is on the label of  Jorge's wines.  He has a bed stashed in a big barrel that was formerly used to make Viña Cazoga.   Jorge sometimes sleeps in the barrel during the harvest. Photo by Gerry Dawes©2011 / gerrydawes@aol.com

Recently someone asked “Which Ribeira Sacra wine is The Spanish Artisan Wine Group bringing into the U.S.?

We will be not be bringing in just one winery from La Ribeira Sacra, but SEVEN (and possibly eight) bodegas! We love La Ribeira Sacra and its small artisan producers.  We believe it is somewhat like Burgundy's mix of small estate producers and somewhat akin to the Loire Valley as well, but the grapesare not Chardonnay or Pinot Noir as in the case of Burgundy,  but the native red Mencía grape is very reminiscent of the Loire's Cabernet Franc.  And Godello? Well, many of the best Godellos can take on the majority of Chardonnays out there these days.

Click here to read the rest of the story and 

see photographs of our seven winemakers from La Ribeira Sacra.

The Spanish Artisan Wine Group & Amorim Corks; A Cork Briefing from Amorim Cork Producers, Portugal

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 Why Cork Stoppers in Bottles of Our 

Spanish Artisan Wine Group Wines Matter

Tubes of cork destined to become wine stoppers at Amorim in Portugal.

All photos by Gerry Dawes©2010. Contact gerrydawes@aol.com for publication rights.

The Wineries of The Spanish Artisan Wine Group

Will All Be Using Specially Selected Amorim Portuguese Corks

In Our Bottles Within Two Years of Being Selected Into the Group

We Will Guarantee Our Wines Against "Cork-taint" 100% 

And We Will Say So on Our Labels!

Carlos de Jesus of Amorim in Portugal explains the process of preparing cork 
that will be made in natural cork wine stoppers. 
All photos by Gerry Dawes©2010. Contact gerrydawes@aol.com for publication rights.

Cork Briefing

Courtesy of Amorim (Click)

Slide show of Amorim cork production.

(Double click on images for enlarged version in Picasa; 
click on "slideshow" in the upper left-hand corner, then hit F11 for a full screen show.)

Alentejo:

Portugal’s Cork Country

The Alentejo is a mystical place of gliding plains, sudden mountains, and the largest cork forests in the world. The Alentejo’s Cork Country is a lightly populated region with open horizons where the rhythm of life follows the rhythm of regional songs. And this fertile land produces more than half of the world's total cork supply.

Cork harvesting at Amorim in Portugal's Alentejo region. 
All photos by Gerry Dawes©2010. Contact gerrydawes@aol.com 

Click here to read the rest of the article.

La Queimada in Galicia with Paco Dovalo and The Association of Bodegueros Artesanos (Artisan Winemakers) - - Video by Zachary Minot, Devour.tv

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Click here for the Video of La Queimada at

Adega Cabaleiro Do Val, Meaño, Val de Salnés, Rías Baixas, Galicia

The Spanish Artisan Wine Group will be bringing in six 
of the artisan wineries in this group in October 2011.

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God and Men (Godello and Mencía) in Ribeira Sacra: Winemaking in Spain's Most Exciting Wine Region for Terroir-Driven Wines

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Chef Michael Chiarello, Bottega, Napa Valley, with José Manuel Rodríguez, President of the D.O. Ribeira Sacra and producer of The Spanish Artisan Wine Group wine, Décima, in José Manuel's precipitously steep Ribeira Sacra vineyards on the Sil River.  Photo by Gerry Dawes ©2011. gerrydawes@aol.com.

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Article by Gerry Dawes

(First published in The Wine News, Fall 2009)

Over the past few years, La Ribeira Sacra, a barely accessible, exquisitely rural wine region in northwestern Spain's mountainous Galicia (some 350 miles northwest of Madrid), has begun to show the most exciting potential I have encountered in more than 40 years of traveling the wine roads of Spain. Here God and men, using primarily godello for white wines and mencía for reds, are creating such irresistibly delicious, enticing, often profound wines that the Ribeira Sacra is rapidly becoming one of the most compelling wine regions on earth. In the bargain, Ribeira Sacra just may be the most strikingly beautiful wine region in the world with its terraced vineyards of dry farmed, old vines indigenous grapes that plunge precipitously hundreds of feet down the slopes of the majestic damned-up canyons of the Minho river, meandering from the north and defining the western zone, and the Sil, flowing from the east and marking the southern tier. Ribeira Sacra is one of only two areas in Spain--the other is Priorat--that practice "heroic viticulture," the laborious care and harvesting of vineyards from such steeply inclined terraces.

(Slide show on Ribera Sacra.)

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Gerry Dawes can be reached at gerrydawes@aol.com; Alternate e-mail (use only if your e-mail to AOL is rejected): gerrydawes@gmail.com

Travels on the Food & Wine Roads of Spain with Spanish Artisan Wine Group Creator Gerry Dawes

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(Note the wineries shown in this video are not members of The Spanish Artisan Wine Group.)

"In his nearly thirty years of wandering the back roads of Spain," Gerry Dawes has built up a much stronger bank of experiences than I had to rely on when I started writing Iberia...His adventures far exceeded mine in both width and depth..." -- James A. Michener, author of Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections

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Leading a group, including Chef Terrance Brennan of New York City

on a week-long culinary, wine and cultural adventure in Valencia and Alicante.

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"Gerry has an extraordinary knowledge of Spain, not just the cuisine and wine but the geography (little tapas bars on tiny streets in villages up in the mountains), history, culture and people. One of the highlights of the trip for me was not a 3-star Michelin meal, but a lunch at a winery. Gerry, of course, knew the winemaker, and we dined in a large beautiful room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the vineyard. We ate simply: tomato salad, jamón ibérico, great bread and olive oil, baby lamb chops grilled over grape vines cuttings (exquisite), ewes’ milk cheese and, of course, great wine. What was special about this was the people, who invited us into their home with warmth and genuine hospitality, their alegría de vida (joie de vivre). I don’t speak Spanish but didn’t have too, we communicated through food, wine, banter, laughter and facial expressions." - - Terrance Brennan, Chef, cookbook author, creator-owner of New York’s Picholine and Artisanal restaurants. Brennan rates this trip, which predates the film pilot, as one of the top two gastronomic experiences of his life.

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gerrydawes@aol.com

Alternate e-mails (use only if your e-mail to AOL is rejected): http://gerrydawes@gmail.com/

Phone: 914-414-6982
Teléfono movíl (during stays in España): (011 34) 670 67 39 34

Website: Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel.

Carlos Aliaga and the Wines of Viña Aliaga at Another Great Lunch at El Crucero, Corella (Navarra

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Pochas at El Crucero.

Slide Show: Lunch at El Crucero

Also see El Crucero in Corella (Navarra), Lunch with the Wines of Aliaga at One of the Great Restaurants of Navarra's Ribera Baja Wine-growing Region, Also Home to One of Spain's Finest Vegetable Growing Regions and Some of Navarra's Little-known, But Best Country Restaurants.

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About Gerry Dawes  

Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel  

Gerry Dawes was awarded Spain's prestigious Premio Nacional de Gastronomía (National Gastronomy Award) in 2003. He writes and speaks frequently on Spanish wine and gastronomy and leads gastronomy, wine and cultural tours to Spain. He was a finalist for the 2001 James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award for Best Magazine Writing on Wine, won The Cava Institute's First Prize for Journalism for his article on cava in 2004, was awarded the CineGourLand “Cinéfilos y Gourmets” (Cinephiles & Gourmets) prize in 2009 in Getxo (Vizcaya) and received the 2009 Association of Food Journalists Second Prize for Best Food Feature in a Magazine for his Food Arts article, a retrospective piece about Catalan star chef, Ferran Adrià. 

In December, 2009, Dawes was the subject of the Food Arts Silver Spoon Award in a profile written by José Andrés. 

". . .That we were the first to introduce American readers to Ferran Adrià in 1997 and have ever since continued to bring you a blow-by-blow narrative of Spain's riveting ferment is chiefly due to our Spanish correspondent, Gerry "Mr. Spain" Dawes, the messianic wine and food journalist raised in Southern Illinois and possessor of a self-accumulated doctorate in the Spanish table. Gerry once again brings us up to the very minute. . ." - - Michael & Ariane Batterberry, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher and Founding Editor/Publisher, Food Arts, October 2009. 

 

Mr. Dawes is currently working on a reality television series 

on wine, gastronomy, culture and travel in Spain.

Experience Spain With Gerry Dawes: Customized Culinary, Wine & Cultural Trips to Spain & Travel Consulting on Spain  

Gerry Dawes can be reached at gerrydawes@aol.com.

John Gilman on New Oak Barrels

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John Gilman, Author-Publisher of A View From the Cellar. 

Photo by Gerry Dawes©2007 / gerrydawes@aol.com* * * * *

New, Small Oak Barrels

"Contrary to my reputation in some circles, I really do not mind wines with a lot of new oak. A perfect example are the Burgundies of producers such as Henri Jayer and Domaine Dujac. Both estates make (or made in Monsieur Jayer’s case) their wines almost entirely in new oak, and yet they are two of the finest producers of wine that I have ever had the pleasure to taste.


But it is extremely hard to use a high percentage of new oak well, and it takes any extremely skilled artist in the cellar to be able to consistently pull this off. Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of producers with as much skill as Monsieur Jayer had during his lifetime. 


Too often, new oak dominates the other characteristics of the wine, both on the nose and the palate, producing in a best-case scenario a one dimensional wine that derives many of its flavors and aromatics from the wood.

And the worst-case scenario (all too familiar to those of us who taste a wide range of wines these days) is that the new oak has been imperfectly cured, and has leeched raw, resinous tones into the wine, which come across as sawdusty or resinous on the palate, and add so much raw wood tannin to the wine as to upset its balance. This condition is usually terminal--as the wine is too tannic from the wood to drink with much enjoyment when young, and spends its life stillborn and rigid from the oak, and eventually withers, with the fruit giving up the ghost while the wood tannins remain obstinately present. 

For those who are familiar with the New York subways, wines from the worst-case scenario camp are like two riders getting onto separate trains at Grand Central Station, with the fruit getting on the Express and the oak getting on the Local. After a short time, they are never going to come together again, and the fruit on the Express is going to be long gone by the time the oak arrives at the mutually agreed upon destination." - - John Gilman, author of the newsletter A View from the Cellar:  (From an interview with Gilman on the Dr. Vino website.)

John Gilman's observations are brilliant.  Like John, I know few who can pull off using all new oak and fewer still who can do that and produce great wines with alcohol levels in excess of 14%.  Basilio Izquierdo, the former winemaker for thirty years at CVNE in La Rioja who made some of the great vintages of CVNE Imperial and CVNE Viña Real Reserva and Gran Reservas, makes both a small production Rioja white and a red that are some of the best wines I have ever tasted in the modern era in La Rioja.  The Spanish Artisan Wine Group will have some of his wines shortly.  --

Down with synthetic corks! Jancis Robinson

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10 Jun 2006 by JR

"Wine producers of the world, please, please, please stop using plastic corks. They are utterly infuriating." -- Jancis Robinson, jancisrobinson.com

Jancis Robinson interviews Portuguese winemaker Dierk Von Di Niepoort at the WineCreator conference in Ronda, 2008.  Photo by Gerry Dawes©2008 / gerrydawes@aol.com

Click here to read the rest of the article.

John Gilman on High Alcohol in Wines versus Sound Acidity for Ageing

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John Gilman, Author-Publisher of A View From the Cellar. 

Photo by Gerry Dawes©2007 / gerrydawes@aol.com 

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Wine Over 14% Alcohol

"If you had said fifteen percent, this would have been easy! In general I think it is important to realize that history has not been kind to wines put in the cellar with high levels of alcohol, other than fortified wines, but that is another story. 

For non-fortified wines, high alcohol usually translates into either a short cellar life or a less than positive evolution in the bottle- or both. There are of course exceptions- Henri Bonneau’s brilliant Châteauneuf du Papes immediately come to mind- but these are exceptions. 

For the vast, vast majority of wines, lower alcohol wines have traditionally aged longer and better. Part of this equation of course is that lower alcohol wines, having started with lower sugar levels in the grapes, generally start out life with higher acidity. I have been drinking wine a long time now, and it is pretty clear to me that acidity is the cornerstone to a wine’s ability to age gracefully for a long period in the bottle and remain fresh and vibrant. And wines that age well are the ones that interest me the most. 

The transformation that a wine undergoes with bottle age is still one of the mysteries of wine- how it improves, what chemical reactions are taking place- all of these things are still unknown even with our advanced levels of science. But if the key fundamentals are in place in the wine when young, we do know that the wine will change and evolve and become more beautiful with age. And one of these keys is sound acidity.

When one thinks back or reads about the legendary Bordeaux wines of the first half of the twentieth century--the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild, the 1928 Palmer, the 1929 Latour or the 1900 Margaux--one of the glaring things that so many commentators fail to mention is how low in alcohol these wines were back then--probably between eleven and twelve percent, and they came from ripe vintages in those days! One of the chief reasons that they lasted so long was specifically because they were lower in alcohol-balanced wines that were able to stand the test of time. 

As Monsieur Bonneau has emphatically proven, it is not impossible to balance your wines at high degrees of alcohol, but it is a hell of a lot harder to do it, and for every Monsieur Bonneau who has been able to succeed with his formula, there are thousands who have tried and failed miserably. A perfect example of the differences between higher and lower levels of alcohol are the 1947 and the 1949 Cheval Blanc--both great wines, but the headier, almost Port-like 1947 is nowhere near as interesting to my palate as the lower alcohol, hauntingly ethereal 1949. I have been fortunate to drink both wines on several occasions, and even once had them served side by side in the same flight at a memorable dinner, and I would be willing to argue that the beautiful 1949 will in the end prove to be the longer-lasting and ultimately more interesting wine. And let me be the first to tell you, not every high alcohol wine is a 1947 Cheval Blanc in the making- no matter what you read elsewhere! 

I think that today high alcohol is one of the worst plagues in the world of wine, as it virtually guarantees that the wine in question will not stand the test of time in bottle. A lot of people might say “so what”, I want to drink my wines younger anyway, so what do I care about higher alcohol. Other than driving home from the dinner party, they may have a point. As long as there remains plenty of cellar-worthy, lower alcohol wines for those of us who want to age our wines, then it should not be a problem. 

In other words, if each individual wine exists in a vacuum, outside of the temporal world in which we live, then there is plenty of room for both kinds of wines. But the reality is that the new car in the driveway of the vigneron who let his grapes hang out on the vine until they were ready to fall off, and consequently was able to get a higher score (and more money) for his wine because some critic was suckered in by the black-purple color and the sweet, warming effects of alcohol on the palate which gave the wine a consistency of motor oil, then the odds are that a few vintages down the road, all of the nieghbors will be vacationing in September and picking their grapes in late October to try and make the same money and drive the same cars. - - John Gilman, author of the newsletter A View from the Cellar:  (From an interview with Gilman on the Dr. Vino website.)

John Gilman of A View From the Cellar on Indigenous Yeasts

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John Gilman, Author-Publisher of A View From the Cellar. 

Photo by Gerry Dawes©2007 / gerrydawes@aol.com 

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Indigenous Yeasts

"The longer I drink, taste and write about wine, the more I am convinced that indigenous yeasts are a key fundament of great wine. It is not that it is impossible to make great wine with commercial yeasts, but these have to be strains that are engineered to be as unobtrusive and “transparent” as possible, so that the natural beauty of the wine that originates in the vineyard can be reproduced as faithfully as possible. 

But even the cleanest and clearest commercial yeast is not, in my opinion, going to quite match the complexity that comes with using indigenous yeasts. And most commercial yeasts these days are not engineered (or selected if you prefer the term) for their transparency, but rather to deliver specific flavor or aromatic spectrums in the wine, or more and more often, to be able to survive at higher levels of alcohol before dying off and ending the fermentation. 

It used to be that no yeasts could survive in solutions with alcohol above fifteen or so percent, but when you are trying to make a black-purple wine so that you can buy a new, black-purple Mercedes SUV, you need a “Rambo” yeast to do the job- one that can keep the fermentation going to sixteen and a half or seventeen percent. 

Otherwise, the winemaker is going to end up with more residual sugar than he or she desired (one of the dirty little secrets of the high octane school is that they are always looking for some residual sugar in their ostensibly “dry” wines), which may or may not effect which model of Mercedes they can buy when the new scores come out." -- From an interview with the great John Gilman, Writer-Publisher of A View From the Cellar, on the Dr. Vino website.

As usual, "The Professor" aka John Gilman, hits the native yeasts on the head.  Most of the small producers of The Spanish Artisan Wine Group use indigenous yeasts to ferment their wines.  That is what makes each wine so distinctly different from the other. - - Gerry Dawes, Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel.