Wine Review: Spanish style shines for seasonal selections

Red wines just keep on coming, which is a sure sign that winter is not far away.

Not only are there a great many new red wine labels and interesting blends appearing in the marketplace, but many have taken a fresh new approach to modernize their red wines. There is a movement toward producing red wines that are more in tune with modern trends to better accompany more subtle and delicately flavored foods that have become popular. Many new red wines are being made or blended to comfortably coexist with these new foods.

I have just had the opportunity to sample a few of them from Spain or in the Spanish style and found them to be as worthy of the reader's attention as they were mine.

Diamandes 2020 Perlita ($18)
The name alone intrigued me as I had never heard of perlita. Consulting my favorite book on wine, Hugh Johnson's "The World Atlas of Wine,” I found absolutely no mention of the perlita grape. I finally resorted to reading the label on the bottle, and there it was. Perlita is not a grape, but a trade name for a blend of malbec and syrah. There was an urge to rip this wine apart because of the wild goose chase that it led me on, but alas I could not do it as this blend proved to be a treat. It appears as if the marriage of these two grape varieties produced an offspring that favored neither parent but made its own statement. The aroma is not at all shy and presents itself with authority by offering black cherries and olives counterbalanced by hints of violets and fresh spice. The beverage ends in a fruit-filled finish. The wine has everything going for it: big flavor, big aroma and an affordable price.

La Universal Dido 2021 ($28)
This wine reflects all of the better qualities to be found in a well-made Spanish wine. The basic components of this wine are 70% grenache balanced by 20% syrah and a 10% mixture of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and a grape variety that was once very popular in California, the carignane. Just the grapes used to make this wine indicate it should be something special. Black cherries, blueberries, raspberry, olives and a suggestion of citrus abound in the aroma. They’re easily detectable and carry through to the finish, which is just as fruity and lasts on the palate for a long time. This is a wine that I would not dare to drink in the traditional Spanish style, from a bota, as it's just too good. A bota bag is an animal skin bag which is held at full arm's length over the head, with the wine directed into the mouth through a tiny spigot without a drop going anywhere else. It’s an art that Spain has mastered. While in Spain, I tried drinking wine from a bota bag, resulting in me getting wine in my eyes and ruining a perfectly good shirt.

C. L. Butaud 2021 Texas Tempranillo ($54)
It appears that the Spanish tempranillo grape has found a new home in Texas as the grape vines and the grapes that they produce do very well there. This wine is not a mirror copy of the Spanish style but cuts its own path of flavor and aroma by displaying the traditional tempranillo dark maroon color and telltale aromas and doing so in its own way. This wine offers the tempranillo signature aromas of plum cherry and strawberry, tobacco and leather, but unlike the Spanish treatment of the grape, which is often muddied by too much oak, this wine has just the right amount of oak. It results in a major separation of this wine from the more traditional Spanish counterparts. The wine ends in what could be called a soft finish where the fruit flavors are not muted by other components but are clean, fresh and obvious.

Wine columnist Bennet Bodenstein can be reached at frojhe1@att.net.