Spanish Wine:
Tumult and Terroir

The history of Spanish wine is full of the beneficial and the baleful, of foreign and fraternal inspiration and interruptions. Considering its ups and downs, it’s a miracle Spain has the wine culture that it does.

First off, grapes have grown in Spain since forever, but it wasn’t until the Phoenicians landed, founding Gadir (now Cádiz) in 1100 BCE, that someone went about turning those grapes into wine. Later, in 227 B.C. the Carthaginians founded Cartagena and brought their taste and talents for wine with them. When the Romans arrived around a century later, they planted more vines and used winemaking practices that local Celtic and Iberian tribes imitated.

One might think Spanish wine was only going to benefit from visitors until centuries later, in 711 ACE, when the Moors conquered most of Spain and held it for 700 hundred years, banning winemaking. Once Catholics reconquered Spain, Spanish winemaking had centuries to get back on its feet, but, sadly, the 20th Century wasn’t one of them as Franco’s fascist government, for the most part, kept Spanish wine from going out and kept developments in winemaking from coming in.

After all of that disruption, today Spain has more vineyard surface area than any other country, and is the third top country in world wine production. Sitting in a prime grape growing latitudinal zone (for now), it has wine regions from its north to its south (and even down in the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa).

Please join us this Friday when guest pourer Kyle Boatright from distributor Free Run Wine Merchants presents a selection of Spanish wines. This is a free walk-up tasting, without any of Franco’s troops. So, you are free to join us any time in the hour and a half.