Dear Readers,

In continuation of my last blog, I’d like to explain another reason why I went to Spain a few weeks ago and how Spanish Vines spent more time looking for a particular wine (as well as the Tempranillo I talked about last week) than any other wine search we’ve done thus far.

Early next year Spanish Vines plans to launch a bottle of wine that will have a very low price but still have top-notch quality. We’re trying to do something with this brand that could be revolutionary, not only  for the Spanish wine world but for the wine world overall; we want introduce people to ‘real’ wine, at a truly affordable price while highlighting how incredible Spanish wines are for the money. This new wine will be the first wine in what we’re calling the Spanish Vines evolution map, where you start slowly with this brand and then move onto the next, one by one until you get up to ENATE Varietales. It’s an incredible introduction into the quality driven, value oriented wines from Spain, and we have fought hard for it.

The fighting for this new wine came because of what we decided to do as opposed to what we could have done. Many brands in the $6.99-$7.99 price segment taste a certain way because of one common factor: added sugar to the wine. In general, these wines have no real sense of place or any character to one varietal over the other; sugar takes that defect and makes it attractive.

Imagine, for example, eating a raw un-ripe peach. The sensation is completely bitter and not very tasty. Now, take another piece of that same un-ripe peach and cover it with sugar. The taste is better, only you have this sticky sensation on the roof of your mouth and maybe even a bad aftertaste. That’s exactly the experience of a lot of the high-production, low-cost wine brands in the market today.

What’s the alternative to adding sugar then? Well, this is where our new wine will be different. We did not want to hide anything in the wine, so we’re going to let the grapes sit on the vine longer and wait until 2011 to launch. We want to fully express the Chardonnay variety with which we chose to work.

The European style or preference to white wines is generally more acidic, citrus-y, and possibly bitter to the American pallet. To mask this, sugar could be added to the wine to make it more “fruity,” but where’s the honor and authenticity in that? The solution? To continue with the peach example, leave that peach on the tree just a little longer, and it will take on totally new characteristics, all while maintaining the integrity and quality of that peach.

It is the same exact idea with the chardonnay grapes for our new wine. After realizing what we wanted to accomplish with the style of this white, it had to come from mother nature, not a laboratory. The winery agreed to designate a certain acreage of Chardonnay grapes solely for the white. We’re going to leave those grapes on the vine just a little longer in order to get that full bodied, round ripe fruit in perfect harmony with great acidity, a wine we can ultimately be proud to promote. Had we chosen to launch right away, we would have compromised a lot, and that’s just not what we’re about.

Entender es Disfrutar,

Josh