"This is one of the most incredible bargains from Spain."

There are some incredible things happening in Spanish wine right now and one of the producers at the heart of this revolution are Envinate. A project between four winemakers who met studying oenology in Alicante in the mid two thousands bonded around a shared ideology and desire to explore and express the underappreciated terroirs of Western Spain. Envinatehas since risen to become one of the icons of 'New Spain' a movement which is has reached a crescendo in recent years as young producers strive to craft wines that showcase a patchwork of Spanish terroirs, using indidgenous grapes farmed fastidiously and rendered into wines without artifice.

If you still think of Spain as a breeding ground of heavily oaked tempranillo, flabby, non-descript whites and over extracted, points chasing wines made from Grenache, then there are few better places to get you up to speed than with the wines of Envinate. 

The group are nomadic in many ways, travelling around and finding old, abandoned vineyards with untapped potential and bringing them back to life. They make wines from vineyards near Taganana, a wild terroir of volcanic soils, plunging valley and howling Atlantic winds on the Island of Tenerife, They craft their louses wines in Ribeira Sacra in Amandi on steep, slate terraces and they produce just one wine, the bottle in today's offer, in Almansa, the only mediterranean influenced wine in the collection.

The wine is called called 'Albahra' which means 'Small Sea' and references the ancient seabed in which the vineyard lies in a shallow basin near Albacete, which is now upwards towards 800m above sea level. It's a wine made primarily from Garnacha Tintorrera, a variety all but abandoned by the mainstream Spanish producers. It's blended with Moravia Agria, a rare and nearly extinct local varietal kept alive but a few impassioned local winemakers holding onto their precious vinous culture which the machine of Spanish industrialised wine rolled by. The resulting wine is a thing of beauty. It's mid-weighted and silky, the at times brooding Garnacha Tintorrera is transformed here into wine of wonderful freshness and succulence. Amidst the fruit you fine lovely wild herb and floral highlights, supple shaping tannins, courtesy of the Moravia Agria, and a beautiful mineral imprint which trails through to the finish. It's a whole lot of wine for the dollars and Luis Guitierrez rightly calls it "…one of the most incredible bargains from Spain." If this is where Spanish wine is headed, then sign me up for whatever is next!