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Aug

Albariño in America

Sean Sellers  in White Wines, Albariño , , ,

In its 25 July post, Finding Wine in Houston, InterWined.com mentioned how the proclivities and personal prejudices of wine distributors and wine companies affected the availability of wine in different markets. And while most weeks InterWined reviews great wines sold in the UK for between £5 and £10, it will dedicate the majority of this week’s posts to wines found in the USA for the comparable prices of $10-20 per bottle.

First up: the 2006 Burgáns Albariño from Rias Baixas in Galicia, bought for under $12. (It currently sells from Oddbins in the UK for £8.99.)

A native and little-planted grape in Galicia, it was not until the Spanish government awarded it with its own D.O. or Denominación de Origen in 1986 (a classification similar to the French appellation) that production began to rapidly increase along with name recognition. Now, it has emerged as the grape of 2007, earning coverage in most wine-related media outlets for its crisp taste and seemingly endless versatility, as InterWined highlighted in two recent posts and as its readers and contributors have mentioned in the comments.

While the 2006 Burgáns isn’t the best Albariño that InterWined has ever tasted (that honour probably goes to the bottle served at Back to Basics in London), it’s a very good wine. Yellow in colour and apple in flavour, it was Appletiser with the bubbles (meant as compliment, by the way). For those unfamiliar with the UK Sparkling Fruit Drink, don’t think cider, but rather the crisp, sometimes slightly syrupy flavour one gets when biting into a really ripe apple from a farmer’s market. Think summer; think sun; think serve with almost anything: 8.2.

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Jacob
Jacob said: August 20th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

Great info… though I wonder how (and if) Albarino would perform outside of Spain…

Come to think of it, very few local Iberian grapes are produced elsewhere, especially when compared to grapes from the big three (France, Italy, Germany).

So what, Albarino not ROMAN enough for you people?

(you people meaning wine producers, not Interwined.com)

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