Spanish wines you should have in your cellar: The top 24

What makes wine a superior beverage is its capacity to improve with age, sometimes for a very long time. However, there are very few wines that have this potential. They need to be fine wines, to be soundly structured and to have something else that shows up with time in bottle. There is no precise definition as to what the ‘something else’ consists of.

Therefore, wine writers recommend best time ranges to enjoy the wines based upon their own experience and assimilation. On this occasion, Sarah Jane Evans MW and I decided to do something different to find our selection of Spanish wines to keep in your cellar.

We are proposing a number of wines, available in the market, which we feel are very likely to improve with ageing. The rationale for our selection is that we tasted the wines in pairs, comparing the latest vintage in the market with a 2012 or older vintage. The wines recommended comply with three conditions: they are premium wines, they are very good now, and they got better with bottle ageing.

Spain is a country of great diversity; we thought it would be more useful for professionals and consumers to explore that diversity instead of concentrating in a few places with a clear historic record of great ageability. Besides, Spain is undergoing a quiet revolution in its vine-growing and winemaking practices. New places, new grape varieties show up as potential pillars for classic wines with ageability, but in these cases there is little historic background to confirm this impression. We needed to check those assumptions against facts: a comparative tasting. Therefore, we tasted wines from a wide range of origins – wines that are not so obvious a choice when looking for wines for the cellar, but which have proved worth the cellaring effort.

Widespread potential

The most classic wine region, Rioja, would have filled five wine lists like this one without any difficulty. There are many stunning Riojas that are over 60 years old. However, other appellations are less evident to the wine lover. We intended to discover and highlight demonstratable potential in these places as well. In addition, we found some superb wines that have been transformed by viticulture. We thought it was worthwhile including some of those wines undergoing Spain’s quiet quality revolution, which are now showing great ageing potential.

There are all types of wines worth cellaring. Red wines obviously represent the majority of our selection, but the potential in some white wines is amazing. Cava and other sparkling wines provide a nice confirmation of what we suspected: the best Cava can improve in bottle over many years. Comments are unnecessary for sweet and fortified wines, made with the purpose of lasting forever. We received no rosé samples; this is on one hand a pity, because we know of a few rosé wines with a splendid potential; on the other hand, it is quite logical, as there are very few wines with such capacity.

We tasted 280 wines to reach this selection of just 24 recommendations. It was a very hard selection process; many wines deserving to be in this selection could not be included. We would appreciate the reader taking this selection for what it is – an exercise to highlight a number of wines that we loved and are definitely worth cellaring. However, there were many other wines that were very worthy of inclusion, but we had to omit from the final list.

Introduction by Pedro Ballesteros Torres. All wines were tasted by Sarah Jane Evans MW and Pedro Ballesteros Torres to decide on the top 24.

First published in the Decanter 2019 Spanish supplement

Top 24 Spanish wines you should have in your cellar