In my 18 years of writing about wine, the best question ever put to me remains one sent by a Washington Post reader about 13 years ago: “What is the best wine in the world that I’ve never heard of?”
My answer at that point was Albariño from the Rias Baixas region in the northwestern corner of Spain. These wonderful whites were still very rare back then, even in a big, open market like Washington, D.C. Today, however, I could jump in my car and be back before long with a trunk-full of different Albariños, which points to two things: First, Spain has really arrived as the major commercial power everyone knew it could be for decades prior to its actual emergence around the turn of the millennium. And second, I need a new answer to my favorite question.
My new answer shares some things with my former one. I’m every bit as clear and convinced about this one, and the wine is once again a varietal offering from the northwest of Spain. That’s where the similarities end, however, as my new choice is a red, namely, Mencia from Bierzo.
Your response to this might well be, “What, from where?” Since bottlings of Mencia from Bierzo are still just starting to trickle into the U.S. market, this wouldn’t be surprising. But trust me: These wines aren’t mere curiosities, but, rather, real contenders for greatness on the world stage, and the best renditions already rival top offerings from Rioja, Priorat, and Ribera del Duero for positions at the very top of Spain’s quality pyramid.
At this point you might well wonder, “If these wines are so terrific, why 
do they remain so obscure?” There are several answers to this. First, Bierzo is an inland region that isn’t geographically geared for export like, say, Bordeaux. Second, the region is phenomenally rugged in topography and relatively remote from major transportation arteries, so most of the vineyards were devoted to wine made for local consumption until recently. Third, the rather isolated setting of the region hampered economic development, and as many other parts of Spain boomed in the two decades between 1998 and 2008, the area around Bierzo became something of a commercial backwater, and many of the steepest and best vineyards were actually abandoned.
Some villages in Bierzo remain so un-modernized even today that the place has a sort of twilight zone feel to it. For example, during my last visit to the area, a five-minute walk though a village included encounters with a communal washing fountain and bread oven as well as a flock of sheep and the Civic Oompah Band (or whatever the equivalent of a Spanish Oompah Band would be). This made for a delightful Monday morning, as you can see from the expression of my WRO colleague
Michael Apstein, but it is not quite what one associates with places like Napa or Bordeaux. If a picture is really worth a thousand words, I need not say more about why Mencia and Bierzo aren’t yet household words in export markets.
But let us not forget: Wine is first and foremost an agricultural product rather than a manufactured good, and if the grape and the ground found in a place are both exceptional, one can make incredible wine even in a commercial twilight zone.
There’s no question that Bierzo can make incredible wine from Mencia, as you’ll discover if you try a wine like Paixar or the Las Lamas or La Faraona from Descendientes de J. Palacios. A top Mencia from Bierzo 
can combine the minerality of great Bordeaux with the acidity of Barolo with the supple feel of Brunello and pack all of that into a wine with the versatile, relatively modest weight of a great Chinon. The coexistence of these qualities in a single wine is uncanny, and yet the best renditions seem pure and natural, which makes the total package somehow even more uncanny.
Today there are enough renditions of Mencia from Bierzo available outside Spain to really show how good–and how distinctive–it can be. This is exactly what I’ll be doing in New York a week from today, when I’ll be conducting a seminar on wines from Bierzo for press and the wine trade between 10:30 and noon at La Fonda del Sol in Manhattan.
If you are located in New York but can’t make it to the seminar (which
I’ll conduct on behalf of Autóctona del Bierzo, a consortium of innovative producers) it will be followed by a tasting showroom and tapas reception at the same site (Vanderbilt Avenue at 44th Street) from noon until 4:30 p.m. For information, go to the website for The Connected Table or call 212-620-7027. If you live elsewhere, not to worry, as I’ll be back with a full column on Bierzo and its leading bottlings of Mencia before long here on WRO.
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