The Culture of Wine: Spain
The first episode of my new podcast series, “The Culture of Wine,” available exclusively on Patreon.com, focused on France. The second episode move across the Pyrenees into Spain: here’s an overview of what’s in the episode.
El Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage which culminates in the Galician, Atlantic city of Santiago de Compostela where St. James’s relics are supposed to rest. Traditionally, there were four starting points in France, all of which passed through Rioja in northern Spain. The leather bags holding the wines which pilgrims bought were the first example of branding, and the wines became known in France as Spain’s finest.
The wines didn’t change much for hundreds of years, until producers from Bordeaux looked towards Rioja—the one Spanish region they knew about—to source wine during the phylloxera disaster. In turn, they transformed Rioja wine culture to something more like we understand it now: aged in oak, with the capacity to produce long-lived wines.
3,000 years ago, the Phoenicians founded the city of Xera which is now Jerez: the soft sh sound for x gives us the Anglicised sherry. The Phoenicians brought vines with them, and wine has been continually made since then—even under Moorish rule, whose language and architecture is still a central part of Andalucian—and Spanish—culture.
Andalucia, in southern Mediterranean Spain, considers itself as the most Spanish of all Spain’s regions: it’s the home of bullfighting, flamenco, and sherry. But it’s a region heavily shaped by outside forces. Any Spanish word which begins with al- is Arabic in origin: the Alhambra in Granada, alfombra is a carpet, alcachofa is an artichoke, the practice of alquimia which brought us the science of distillation which is used to increase the level of alcohol.
In 1587, the English pirate Francis Drake raided the Andalucian city of Cadiz and took with him 2 million litres of wine back to England, making it the patriotic duty of every Englishman to drink the wine. They became popular, first mentioned by Shakespeare, and future imports had to be fortified: hence the birth of modern sherry.
These outside influences on the development of Spanish wine and culture are an example of the fragmented, contested nature of Spain, which most horrifically resulted in the Civil War in the late 1930s and the subsequent fascist dictatorship. There are many versions of Spanish identity, shaped but also defined against foreign influence as well as vastly contrasting interpretations from within.
The great cities of Barcelona and Valencia look outwards towards the Mediterranean, to the islands of Mallorca, Ibiza, and Menorca, where Catalan is also spoken. In north-west Sardinia, there’s a town called Alghero which has a distinct Catalan influence on its architecture, food, and language. That Catalan identity is also seen in Roussillon, the other side of the Pyrenees in France.
Northern Spain is green and Atlantic. Basque Spain is fiercely independent, with a language like no other, connected to Basque France also on the Atlantic. Moving westwards, Asturias is cider country populated by cows wearing bells, the soundtrack to the countryside. Across the rugged mountains is Galicia, the Ireland of Spain: wet, verdant, poor, known for fishing and smuggling, detached from the rest of Spain it feels neglected by.
The Spain as we imagine it is the vast plateau, called Meseta, which sits above the mountain ranges rising from the coast. It’s hot and dry, the summers relentless, the winters cold and bleak. La Mancha, south-east of Madrid and where Don Quixote came from, is the largest wine region in the world, making basic wine often for brandy production. The best regions, like Ribera del Duero to the west of Madrid, are at elevation to cool the conditions down: Spain is a country which rises and then rises again.
Madrid sits in the middle of all this, a medieval village converted into the capital city because it was literally the centre of Spain. It has an imperial grandeur, the pace of life is fast and frantic, yet pedestrian and languid when it gets hot. It’s a city of many contradictions: a church with a painting by Goya on the altar and a sex museum round the corner.
That’s Spain: a series of contradictions. There is so much history, which pushes an understanding of the country in different directions. For all that history, though, so much has changed since the transition to democracy in the 1970s, and that’s true of wine: regions such as Rías Baixas, Rueda, Toro, Bierzo, and Priorat are completely different and improved, known around the world when they were once barely known in Spain. In contrast, as the Franco regime opened up, sherry and Cava, like the construction industry, went through huge booms, from which they are still recovering. Spain’s dilemma can often be having too much of a good thing.
Spain is a vivid, vibrant, frustrating expression of the past, present, and future all rolled into one. The wine industry is no different, where grape prices are too cheap, where some of the greatest wines of the world are made, where wine is used for Sangria, where the next trend is right around the corner. If you ever think you’ve figured out Spain, you’ve probably had one glass too many.