Spanish Viticulture
November 20, 2006 – 1:16 pmIn the Fall 2006 issue of The Quarterly Review of Wines, the red wine of the quarter is a Spanish wine, the Legaris Crianza 2003. It looks like BevMo doesn’t carry this wine, and Heritage doesn’t seem to carry it either. To their credit, the people at Heritage said they would help me find it if I gave them some more information about the wine.
The man at Heritage with whom I spoke over the telephone asked if I knew in what region of Spain this wine was produced. Based on this capitalwine.net page, I told him it looked like the region was Ribera del Duero. The man at Heritage immediately recognized the region and thought the chances were good that if the wine was available locally that he could get get some for me.
My wine knowledge is fairly elementary at this point, and I was impressed that this man seemed to immediately recognize this particular region of Spain. Now, of course this is his job, so I really shouldn’t be so surprised. But I decided to Google around for information on wine making in Spain to see what was out there. I came across a fairly interesting bit of trivia:
Some of these regions are huge, and account for the fact that Spain has the largest area of land dedicated to viticulture of any country in the world.
Maybe this is a well known piece of wine trivia, but I had no idea. Of course there is a caveat:
Unfortunately for lovers of fine wine, much of these vines are Airén, an undistinguished white grape responsible for some of the worst wines I have ever tasted.
On a side note, I spent a few more minutes using Google to find a list of the countries with the most land dedicated to viticulture (presumably with the metric being grape vine acreage), but I couldn’t come up with anything. I’ll post again if I find out.
UPDATE: Okay, I found one list of “World Vineyard Acreage By Country”. I’ve provided the link below. But before you click on the link, let’s play a little game. I’ll give you four of the five countries that have the greatest vineyard acreages. You try to guess which country sits in fourth place.
- Spain
- France
- Italy
- ???
- United States
Here are the results, which appear to have been published in March 2004.
3 Responses to “Spanish Viticulture”
*PFFT* You didn’t know that?
By adam on Nov 22, 2006
Didn’t know what? That Spain had the most land dedicated to wine-making, or what the fourth country on the list in the update was?
But no, I didn’t know either. In the case of Spain, I would have guessed France or Italy. In the case of the list in the update, I would have been way off.
By jjk on Nov 22, 2006
*PFFT* = *sarcasm*
I would have guessed something like France > Italy > US > Australia > Others.
By adam on Nov 27, 2006