Wines of the week: thrilling new Spanish whites

1. Mauricio Lorca Calma Indómita Albarín, Castilla y León, Spain 2023

£15.99, Jaded Palates

Spain is perhaps the most changed wine country of the past couple of decades, with a thrilling emergence of talented smaller winemakers, many of a natural, organic-leaning bent, popping up in remote spots all over the place and making wines from all manner of rediscovered local grape varieties. The country is still perhaps best known for its reds, but it’s the formerly rather patchy white wines that have made the most progress – and every week seems to bring a new and intriguing vino blanco to my attention. This week it was a wine made from a grape variety that, in familiar 21st-century Spanish wine fashion, had been all but extinct before the turn of the millennium, but which is now being conjured into wines of immense character and charm. Found in Asturias and Castilla y León, albarín is a rather different thing to the more famous albariño, producing, in the case of Mauricio Lorca’s example, a mouthfilling but fresh white that smells of a summer veranda filled with fragrant white flowers, and tastes of pithy citrus and chalky minerals.

2. M&S Found Verdil, Valencia, Spain 2024

£9, Marks & Spencer

I will certainly be looking out for more albarín, but for the time being, wines made from albariño, which comes from further west in Atlantic coastal Galicia, is much easier to find in the UK (and Spain for that matter), in racy salty-peachy, seafood-friendly bottles such as the immaculately fresh and fluent, distinctively blue-bottled Mar de Frades, Rías Baixas 2024 (£17.50). Albariño’s only real rival as a Spanish white in the UK supermarkets is verdejo, another distinctively aromatic variety that is generally made in a fresh, unoaked style with something of the pungency and zing of New Zealand sauvignon blanc about it (the worst example also share the same flaw: a kind of skunk-like sweaty stinkiness). At home in Rueda in Castilla y León verdejo at its best, as in Bodegas Naia Verdejo 2023 (£17.35, NY Wines) is a punchy mix of aniseed and fennel-tinged tropical fruitiness with an attractively, refreshingly bitter twist on the finish. It’s not to be confused with a partial homonym verdil, another rare revived white grape from Valencia that is macerated on the skins to make M&S’s great value peach-and-mandarin-scented Found orange wine.

3. Ontañón Rioja Blanco, Rioja, Spain 2023

£11.95, ND John

For years, Rioja pretty much was Spanish wine for most people, and the region continues to dominate sales both abroad and domestically. It is in most people’s minds a red-wine place, which are for the most part made in a very specific, coconut-and-vanilla oaky style. While much that is thrilling in Rioja is still red, with many more styles now being made, and with many more smaller producers emerging often with single-vineyard wines, it’s the remarkable improvement of the whites that is perhaps the most surprising development in the region over the past decade or so. A sometimes-justified criticism of Rioja’s white winemaking in the past, was that they were a little too clumsy and carefless with their use of oak barrels. But many of my favourites today show how satisfyingly rich but balanced oaked white wines can be. Bodegas Ontañon’s brightly stone-fruited, creamy rich Blanco is a great-value roast chicken-matching choice; Bodegas Perica’s single-vineyard offering Finca Valdelascarretas 2020 (£37.95, Thorne wines; Vino Gusto), with its sensuously silken texture, its flavours of dried and fresh stone fruit and orange pith, and its creamy turron nougat tones, takes the style to a whole other, luxurious dimension.  Mauricio Lorca Calma Indómita Albarín, Castilla y León, Spain 2023 (from £15.99, Jaded Palates; Christopher Piper Wines; Seven Cellars).