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Around Spain in 10 Garnachas

Happy in Spain’s often testing rural terrain, this once unfavoured red variety is enjoying a surge in popularity among growers and critics alike, as regional authenticity finds increasing favour. David Williams selects his 10 top producers and their wines of the moment.

The story of Garnacha in Spain over the past century is a classic of the rise-and-fall genre. We might start it among the worried wine-growers in turn-of-the-20th-century Rioja. Phylloxera had finally arrived in the region, having first been recorded in Spain’s south in the mid-1870s, and it brought to an end a period when Rioja – and many other parts of northern Spain – had enjoyed a vinous export boom, as the French (and other drinkers of French wine) looked south to find vineyards to replace their own phylloxera-ravaged vines. Now that the plague had taken them too, Rioja’s growers were replanting.

David Williams’ top 10 Garnachas

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