Garnacha/Grenache

The Rhone Report: About Rhone and Rhone-Style Wines and Winemakers is part of an ongoing series. Last month we reported on American Rhone-style wines we tasted at the 16th annual Hospice du Rhone events in Paso Robles, California from May 1 to 3, 2008. We noted that this event was an opportunity to consider Rhone-style wines from a fresh perspective because, unlike most tasting opportunities, these events included Rhone-style wines from the Rhone Valley itself (51 wineries), elsewhere in France (4 wineries) as well as from Spain (4 wineries), Australia (17 wineries), South Africa (6 wineries), Chile (2 wineries), Argentina (1 winery) and the United States. While this was a California-dominated event, and while many of the Rhone Valley’s best producers weren’t represented, there was still sufficient European and other entries to make for interesting comparisons and contrasts.

The Rhone Report: About Rhone and Rhone-Style Wines and Winemakers is part of an ongoing series. Last month we discussed the white Rhone style wines offered at the 2008 Rhone Rangers tasting event at Fort Mason in San Francisco on March 18. This month we turn to the reds, of which we tasted 50. Among those we tasted were some old favorites and some wineries or bottlings with which we were not yet familiar. We don’t pretend that we tasted a representative group of wines, because our sample was skewed to wines we have loved in the past and others about which we have heard positive comments.

You can hardly find Priorat , or Priorato in Spanish, on a map, it’s so small. This tiny Catalonian wine region covers just 4,151 acres – Rioja, in comparison, is over 150,000 acres in size – but Priorat’s impact on the world of wine is large.

Let’s face it, when you hear someone say, “La Mancha,” you think of windmills – and a certain self-styled knight – rather than wine. It’s time to connect this region’s name not only to Miguel de Cervantes’ famous novel but also to La Mancha’s wines. After all, La Mancha isn’t just Spain’s largest wine region, it’s the largest in the world. The La Mancha DO covers about half of the Castile-La Mancha region, stretching from just east of Toledo south to Puertollano, and east to La Roda.