Spanish wines: the natural movement

Small geniuses, great rediscoveries

It's often said that Spanish wines are of the very highest quality and can compete with any wine in the world. We'd like to say that's entirely true, but we think our neighbours are still ahead of us. Luckily, as in any good story, small producers keep emerging — increasingly well-travelled and well-tasted — who know how to draw the most absolute honesty from their land.

Spain enjoys an incredible richness of soils and a dazzling variety of microclimates —though the clock of climate change is ticking faster here than almost anywhere else. It's becoming clear that our wines, in constant dialogue with our neighbours but without pretending to be something they can't, can be wonderfully rich.

The flavour we were told we had

On the Iberian Peninsula, more than almost anywhere else, we should remember that it's relatively recent that we started bottling wine under our own label. That's why the flavour we were told for decades our musts had was nothing more than a formula designed to sell more wine, not to express the place it came from.

Thanks to Spain's artisan or natural movement, we've saved from extinction grapes such as Sumoll, the Malvasia de Sitges, Albillo or Albarín —varieties nobody would have bet on surviving twenty years ago, and that today are making wine again under their own name.

The ground still to cover

We still have a long way to go, but we're excited to keep discovering what the future holds for Spanish wines. At Terroir Radical we're not spectators of this movement: we're in it, selecting the producers who've already been working at it for years.