The great garnacha renaissance: how Spain’s ‘worthless’ grape became a cult favourite

When Daniel Jiménez-Landi was growing up in the remote village of Méntrida in the Gredos mountains west of Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s, the future for an aspiring winemaker was very much elsewhere. “It was a region in black and white, lost to the wine world,” says Jiménez-Landi, speaking at a recent event devoted to Gredos and its wines in London. “Everyone was abandoning the vineyards and running off to Madrid to find work.”

Spain’s ongoing trend of rural to urban migration was part of the problem. But so, too, was the main local grape variety. At the time, the thing to have if you were looking to make serious wine in Spain was the tempranillo that dominated in Rioja and Ribera del Duero. But Gredos was all about the unfashionable garnacha, a variety that Jiménez-Landi was constantly being told “was worthless”.

“We were ashamed of garnacha”, adds Jiménez-Landi’s childhood friend and fellow winemaker Curro Bareño, also in London. “We were praying to have some tempranillo in the vineyards. If we just had one hectare of tempranillo, we could make a living.”

Very few Spanish winemakers would be making a similar wish today. After a period of steep decline that ran from the 1980s to the mid-2010s during which growers ripped out around two thirds of the country’s garnacha, replacing it with tempranillo and then-fashionable “international” (aka French) varieties such as cabernet sauvignon, its reputation has been entirely transformed.

Jiménez-Landi, who chose to stay in Gredos “while almost everyone left”, deserves much of the credit. The Comando G project he started with university friend Fernando García in the late 2000s was responsible for uncovering a whole new style of garnacha in Gredos. The Comando G wines, as exemplified by the astonishing 2017 vintage of Rozas 1er Landi brought to the London event, were pale, fragrant, and nimble, with notes of wild thyme and rosemary and warm earth, and a blood orange or rosehippy tanginess. These were small-batch wines made from single plots, many of them barely cultivated, of often very old vines grown on granite soils at elevations of up to 1,000m or more. While very much their own thing, they were somewhat akin to the similarly ethereal wines of Burgundy, and these “pinot noirs of the south” were soon attracting a similarly cultish fanbase (and prices to match).

But they also triggered a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of Gredos as a winemaking region, which now has more than 50 projects. “People are coming back”, Jiménez-Landi says, including his friend Bareño, who says he “ran away to Galicia like a coward” but has returned to his home region to make impressively expressive wines such as Vitícola Méntridana Canto Platero 2024 (£56.95, vinissmus.com), while still making amazing wines in Galicia under his Fedellos label. Other highlights at the London Gredos tasting included the sublimely silky El Reventón 2023 (£44, imported by flintwines.com), and the fragrant, pure, rosehip-tea-like A Pie de Tierra Ronca de Mazalba 2024 (£29, imported by indigowine.com).

Generally produced in small (sometimes tiny) quantities, the Gredos wines are, however, just one part of the Spanish garnacha renaissance. Aragon, the variety’s original northeastern Spanish home, provides such effortless bright-berried bargains as Waitrose Blueprint Old Vine Garnacha, Cariñena 2024 (£7.50). In Catalonia’s Priorat, another place of old vines in high lands, the Garnacha is often combined with cariñena (aka carignan in France, where garnacha goes by grenache) in a deeper, denser, more structured style, although Sangenis i Vaqué Garbinada Priorat 2024 (£17, thewinesociety.com) has plenty of freshness and dark-fruited charm, too. Finally in Rioja, garnacha, for so long a minor partner in blends dominated by tempranillo, is very much back, taking the solo lead in wines such as the polished, pure-red-fruited Sierra de Toloño La Dula Garnachas de las Alturas 2023 (£23.99, leaandsandeman.co.uk).