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FOOD AND DRINK

Ten facts you probably didn’t know about Spanish wine

It was the Romans' favourite drink, a muse to Picasso and fell victim to the fascist regime of dicator Francisco Franco. Wine blogger Timmer Brown lifts the lid on everything you (probably) didn't know about Spanish vino.

Ten facts you probably didn't know about Spanish wine
Spain is the biggest exporter of wine in the world. Photo: LexnGer/Flickr

1) Spanish wine was the Romans’ favourite tipple 

Wine has been produced in Spain since the first century AD. The Roman historian Pliny the elder raved about wines made from the area known today as Alella, which is 20 minutes from Barcelona. Another Roman, Ovid, noted the most popular wine in Rome (from Spain of course) known as Saguntum, was only good for getting your mistress drunk. The Catalan regional government found remnants of an ancient Roman wine press in Teia, near Alella, and have developed an interactive museum tour to see just how wine was made during this time.


The town of Alella, where wine production began in Roman times. Photo: Timmer Brown

2) A record breaking exporter 

Spain is the top exporter of wine in the world.  In 2021, Spain exported 222 million litres with the majority of it going to France. Not only is Spain a top exporter, but in 2021 it became the second largest producer of wine, behind Italy and now ahead of France. While everyone thinks of Rioja when they think of Spanish wine, the top area for volume is actually Castille-La Mancha near the capital of Madrid.
 
 
3. Different classifications 
 
Spain has 78 sub-regions of wine across 17 provinces of the country, including the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands. They are classified as Denominación de Origen (DO) and Denominación de Origen Calificada (DOC). Both denote wineries meet stringent requirements to produce wine, with the DOC designation being the highest quality. Currently only two regions have met DOC requirement in Spain, Rioja and Priorat. In Catalonia, it is referred to as DOQ Priorat due to the Catalan language spelling and pronunciation.
 

Priorat is one of two Spanish regions to have attained a DOC classification. Photo: Timmer Brown
 
4. There are over 400 grape varieties in Spain!
 
Yes, 400! However, the bulk of the production comes from Tempranillo, Garnacha, Monastrell, Albariño, Palomino, Airen, Macabeo, Parellada, and Xarel-lo. The most widely planted is Airen, a white wine grape which is valued for a variety of reasons including its hardiness. Second is Tempranillo, the popular grape of Rioja, followed closely by Garnacha which is planted throughout Spain but mostly known internationally due to the Catalan region of Priorat.
 

5. Cava isn’t just from Catalonia

Everyone knows that Cava is the Spanish equivalent of sparkling wine, which utilizes a similar method of production as Champagne. Although 95 percent of Cava production comes from Catalonia where it originated in the late 19th century at Codorniu Winery in Sant Sadurni d’Anoia it can also be produced in Aragon, Castile and Leon, Valencia, Extremadura, Navarra, Basque Country and Rioja. It is regulated by DO Cava, which determines the rules and regulations of the production of Cava.


The cava cave at the Raventos i Blanc winery in Sant Sadurni d’Anoia. The owners are direct descendants of the originator of cava. Photo: Timmer Brown. 

6.Spanish wine was Picasso’s muse. 

Pablo Picasso’s inspiration for the cubism movement came from his time in DO Terra Alta town of Horta de Sant Joan, a two and a half hour drive south of Barcelona and near the Catalan border town of Tortosa. Picasso spent time there while he was splitting his time between Barcelona and Paris beginning in 1901. In fact, in many of Picasso’s paintings you can see the elements of the people from the towns, and also the vineyards where he sometimes slept in at night under the stars. Wine is also directly in many of his works, including Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table from 1912.
 
 
7. La Rioja has been making wines for nearly a thousand years 
 
The first mention of the name Rioja in official documents as a wine producing region dates back to 1092, while during the same time, King Garcia Sanchez I donated lands  to the monastery of San Millan de la Cogolla, which included the vineyards. Monks and monasteries played an important role in wine production all across Spain after lands were reconquered from the Moors starting at that time, and leading up to 1834 when legislations saw monastery lands confiscated for the benefit of the common citizens of Spain.
 

Members of the Sánchez family in their vineyard on La Palma, Canary Islands. Photo: AFP
 
8. The Franco years were dark days for Spanish wine 
 
The Franco dictatorship was a dark time for wine production, as wine was not allowed to be exported. Franco was a teetotaller, believing wine should only be used for church sacraments and not much else. Still, when it was discovered that US President Eisenhower was a fan of sparkling wines, Franco commissioned Perelada to produce a special cava for his visit to Spain in December of 1959. Some of the original bottles from the commission are on display at the winery. Salvador Dali was also a fan of Perelada cava, offering it to his guests who came to visit.
 
A photo from the Perelada winery museum showing Salvador Dali enjoying a glass of Perelada near his seaside home in Cadaqués. Photo: Timmer Brown. 
 
9. Spain is the number one worldwide producer of organic wine. 
 
Twenty-seven percent of organic wine production happens in Spain, with over 80.000 hectares of land is specifically registered and documented as organic. Even one of Spain’s largest wine producers, Torres, has one third of their vineyards as organic. This has been a meteoric rise, as organic wineries were rare in Spain up until the 1990s. However, due to traditional winemaking techniques, many winemakers throughout Spain have refused to use chemicals or pesticides in wine production from the 1950s up to the present time. The earliest documentation of an organic winery is from the 1970s at the Penedes vineyard of Albet i Noya.
 
10. Sherry is uniquely Spanish
 
Sherry is originally from the Jerez region of southern Spain. In fact, other areas around the world aren’t allowed to call themselves just Sherry as the region has a trademark on the brand, similar to the French region of Champagne. Sherry production dates back to the 8th century, and speculation says it’s been around for much longer. It was first exported in the 12th century and became extremely popular in England, and other areas began to adopt the methods to make their own variation of Sherry. In the 16th century Sherry was regarded as the finest wine available in Europe. 
 
 
 
Timmer moved to the Barcelona region four years ago after traveling the world for 15 years, working in marketing and public relations. He founded catalunyawine.com in 2014 to promote the wine region of Catalonia to the English speaking public. Now he travels to the vineyards of the region interviewing winemakers and exploring the history of the wine region. You can follow the journey on Twitter and Instagram @catalunyawine and also on the website.

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FOOD AND DRINK

How hi-tech hops are keeping beer bitter in Spain as climate bites

Outside a warehouse in northwestern Spain, it's a freezing, foggy morning but inside it's balmy, the warmth and LED lights fooling 360 hop plants to flower as if it were late August.

How hi-tech hops are keeping beer bitter in Spain as climate bites

Mounted on a soaring grid system of cables and wire, these vigorous climbing plants are in full flower, covered in delicate papery-green hops which are prized for giving beer its unique aroma and crisp, refreshing bitterness.

Normally farmed outside, the hop plants are part of a unique indoor farming project by Spanish startup Ekonoke, which has developed an alternative way to cultivate this climate-vulnerable crop in order to protect the drinkability of beer.

Experts say rising temperatures and increased droughts have made Europe’s hop harvests increasingly unpredictable, lowering yields and reducing the quality of the alpha acids in its resins and oils that are so crucial to the taste and character of different beers.

“Climate change is affecting the field, and last year we were down 40 percent on hop production in Europe,” said Giacomo Guala, policy adviser on hops for Copa-Cogeca, which groups the European Union’s main farmers unions.

“You don’t get rain when you’re supposed to, or too much rain when you’re not supposed to, so that predictability is no longer there,” he told AFP.

Hi-tech hops

Brewers are already feeling that unpredictability.

Having a stable supply of hops was “crucial” as there was no alternative to give that bitterness, explained Jose Luis Olmedo, head of research and development at Cosecha de Galicia, the innovation arm of Spanish brewer Hijos de Rivera, which makes Estrella Galicia beer.

Reliant until now on field-grown hops, the Galicia-based brewer quickly saw the potential of the indoor hops grown by Ekonoke.

When the startup raised €4.2 million in investment rounds in 2022, it said “a significant” chunk of it came from the brewer.

An employee hand-picks indoor-grown hops during harvest at Ekonoke company’s facility. (Photo by Brais Lorenzo / AFP)

It also caught the attention of the world’s largest brewer AB InBev, joining its startup accelerator programme.

“What brewers are most interested in is the guaranteed supply of quantity and quality,” said Ekonoke chief executive Ines Sagrario at their 1,200-square-metre (13,000-square-foot) pilot farm in Chantada, where they harvested their first crop in mid-February.

They began trials at their Madrid lab in 2019, starting with four plants and scaling to 24, slashing the growing time and using “15 times less water” than outdoors, while aiming “to reach 20”.

“In this warehouse, we control all the environmental and nutrient parameters and the lighting factors, using LED lights to provide the plant what it needs when it needs it,” said Sagrario.

The lights replicate the different colours and intensity of sunlight at each stage of the growth cycle when they bathe the rapidly growing plants in an ambient purple glow.

Halving the growth cycle

The heady scent of hops permeates the air as a huge bine laden with hop cones is cut from its trellis, tumbling to the floor before being carried out to a red harvesting machine.

Grown without soil, the bines are fed by a closed system that allows constant reuse of the nutrient-infused water and doesn’t use pesticides, relying instead on tightly controlled access protocols.

“In the field, although the cycle is six months, they can only harvest once a year, because you need the correct growing conditions,” said agronomist and chief operations officer Ana Saez.

Ana Saez, 45, agronomist and chief operating officer, harvests indoor-grown hops at Ekonoke. (Photo by Brais Lorenzo / AFP)

“Here, as we can control and replicate ‘spring’, we’ve reduced the crop cycle to three months.”

Multiple trials had shown their hops contained “more alpha acids per kilogram” than those in the field, Saez said, pointing to the abundance of yellow powdery lupulin clinging to the cones.

By summer, three grow rooms will be operational with more than 1,000 plants maturing on a staggered basis.

“Once we finish learning everything we need to learn in this pilot, we will be building a full-scale industrial facility with 12,000 square metres of growing area,” said Sagrario, whose 12-strong team has so far managed to replicate five different hop cultivars.

For Hijos de Rivera, it’s a project of “strategic” importance, with the brewer planning to have the facility fully operational “by the end of 2025”, said Olmedo.

Mirek Trnka, a bioclimatologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences, said hydroponics was one solution, but scaling up to meet market demands would be tricky.

“Even though the hop is a minority crop, you’d have to upsize operations quite significantly to match the current production globally by hydroponic growth,” he told AFP.

At Ekonoke, they see their role as using science and technology to protect the hops’ biodiversity and eventually developing new hybrids “to give more quantity and quality using less resources”.

“People ask us if hop farmers outdoors feel threatened by us, but we’re not threatening them. Climate change is threatening them,” said Sagrario.

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