Winecast: Spanish Wine Quality Classification

Hi and welcome to the WineCast. I'm your host the Unknown Winecaster and this cast on Spanish wine quality classification along with casts on Italy and France completes a troika of casts on how Europe's top wine producing countries classify their wines. There's also a cast on the framework that the European Union's member countries adhere to and that's worth checking out because it'll be referenced pretty early on here. So let's get started. Spain's classification system conforms to the three-tiered structure used by the European Union with the major tweak in Spain's case being that the PDO, protected designation of origin, or the quality wine tier is pretty heavily subdivided. Since these subdivisions can get a little complex let's knock off the easy stuff first and start our look at Spain's quality pyramid at the base and then work our way up. The vino de mesa or table wine tier classification is similar to parallel designations in the Italian and French systems. Grapes can be sourced from all over Spain and apart from health and safety laws there is little regulation for wine produced at this tier and the expectations for quality production aren't high. Still some quality producers will opt to have their wines given this designation usually because they want to work outside of the regulations of the PDO level and there's no PGI level in their area or because they want to experiment with producing quality wines with grapes sourced from different regions. You'll actually see some of these wines for sale in the US where this caste originates and it can be tricky telling a quality producer working at this level from someone who just wants to make an expensive wine. So if you see a wine with this designation or are not identified as anything other than product of Spain get online and do a little bit of research. Price is also a helpful guide here. Low quality wines at this tier will usually fall in the four to six dollar a bottle range while quality producers will try to price their wines around twice that or maybe a little more. The next tier up is for vino de la tierra, literally wine of the land but country wine works fine as a translation. This tier has a lot of the same things going on that the IGP and IGT tiers do in France and Italy. There's more regulation here but it's pretty mild when compared to what's going on in the quality tier and while a lot of cheap marginal and low quality wine finds a home here so does a fair amount of quality wine made by producers interested in experimenting and getting creative. There are currently 46 VDT regions in Spain and they can be quite large in size but not all of Spain's 17 autonomous communities, they sort of function like states do in the US, have them. There are no vino de la tierra regions in the Canary Islands, the Basque Country or Catalonia. The absence of VDTs is especially striking in the latter of the three because Catalonia is a wine powerhouse in Spain producing upwards of 20% of Spain's quality wine. In this sense Catalonia can be compared to the Piedmont in Italy which doesn't have any IGT regions, the corresponding category in Italy, and instead chooses to focus on the PDO level designations as a road to quality. You'll know you're getting a VDT when you see the words vino de la tierra on the label followed by the name of the VDT region where the wine was produced. Here's a very highly regarded example of a VDT. It's a blend of Tempranillo and two international varieties, Cabsov and Syrah, and the use of international varieties is probably the reason it's not classified at the PDO level for its region. On the reverse you can see a label that designates this wine as a vino de la tierra de Castilla y León, the VDT where it was produced. We enter the PDO level with a mouthful of a classification, vino de calidad con indicacion geografica, or quality wine with a geographic indication. This category is very similar to the now out of use VDQS tier of the French quality pyramid, and like its French cousin it was conceived as a stepping stone or a transitional tier for VDTs to make the move to the DO certification. There are currently less than 10 of these in Spain and we won't spend a lot of time talking about them because their future is uncertain. As EU member countries work to bring their quality classifications into conformity with the parent framework, categories like this are likely to disappear rather than get expanded as happened in France with the VDQS. The heart of the quality level is the denominación de origen or the DO tier. The phrase translates as designation of origin and its counterparts in France and Italy are the AOCs and DOCs of those systems. Like those designations, DOs highly regulate every aspect of production from the vineyard through the and each DO is governed by a Consejo Regulador or a regulatory council that makes and enforces those rules. Rioja would be the first region in Spain to receive this designation in 1925, though a national rollout would be some years away, and what happened in Rioja was definitely influenced by a similar move to create quality designations in France in the early 20th century. The Spanish and the French love to debate which country gets to take credit for being the first to create a designation of origin system, and I won't take sides here, but like so many controversies mentioned on this cast, it's best discussed over a nice glass of wine. Finally, this is a dynamic category and I had trouble pinning down exactly how many DOs there were in Spain at the time of this cast, but the number is in excess of 60 and it looks like it'll continue to add new members. A step up from the DO level is the denominación de origen calificada or DOCA. The additional word in the name means qualified and accordingly the standards for quality in this tier are higher than they would be at the DO level, and admission to the category is based on showing a proven track record of quality for at least 10 years as a DO. This category is pretty exclusive and so far only two regions have been elevated to it, Rioja in 1991 and Priorat in 2009. If you see this designation on a bottle of Priorat, incidentally, which is an area in Catalonia, a region of Spain with its own language, Catalan, the designation will be spelled in Catalan and abbreviated DOQ per that spelling. Though my understanding is that nothing official is in the works, all the good wine gossip says that if another DO is elevated to DOCA status in the near future, it'll likely be the region of Ribera del Duero. At the very top of the pyramid is a relatively new category, vino de pago or estate wine. This category could be unique among EU member countries with quality wine designations because it applies only to individual vineyards or estates and not to whole regions. The quality standards are high, comparable to those at the DOCA level, and though there are currently, as of mid-2016, only 17 estates that have received this designation, look for it to grow. Those are the quality designations in Spain and what they add up to looks like this at present and will possibly end up looking like this in the future with the likely demise of the VCIG category. Before we end though, we should talk about one more aspect of quality designation in Spain, and that's aging. In both Italy and Spain, aging is linked to quality in wine and claims about aging are strictly regulated. In Spain, the system is nationwide, as opposed to Italy where the individual areas set aging requirements, and the system is fairly elaborate. There are actually two parallel systems in place, one that can be used by both PGI and PDO level wines, and one that is exclusively for PDO level wines. The system shared by both tiers is pretty straightforward. A wine is designated as either vino noble, vino agnejo, or vino viejo, depending on how much time it's been allowed to age either in barrel or bottle. In the case of wines designated as vino viejo, there's an additional component to the aging that must take place in an oxidative environment where the wine is exposed to air, heat, or light, or some combination of the three. This last category is most closely associated with wine production in the Condado de Huelva, a region of southern Spain, where there's a tradition of producing wines made in an oxidative style. For the PDO-only system, the rules also specify a three-tiered system, crianza, reserva, and gran reserva, but get a little more elaborate in that they specify a minimum time that the aging must take place in oak, and then a total overall aging minimum that can be completed in bottle. Red wines made in Rioja and Ribera del Duero have a slightly different aging protocol, which just bumps up the minimum in oak for crianza and gran reserva by six months. And whites and rosés, which generally aren't aged in Spain, have their own protocol if they are aged, with a minimum six months in oak across the board and successively larger overall minimums. Keep in mind that these rules just specify minimum time in oak or overall, and producers can and do leave their wines on oak longer than the minimums, and also allow them to age beyond the overall minimums. Spaniards take aging very seriously. Finally, a word about something you might see on a Spanish label from time to time, roble. Roble just means oak, and on a wine label it's an unspecified and unrequired term that indicates that the wine has seen some time in barrel, but less than the amount of time needed to qualify as a crianza. Since the term is unregulated, the same concept can be expressed by phrases like semi crianza and meses en barrica, or months in barrel, preceded by a number. That's this winecast. Thanks again for joining me, and I hope you found this information helpful and interesting. Please subscribe and like below, and I'd love to hear from you in the comments. I'm the Unknown Winecaster, and I'm out. Enjoy the grape, but always enjoy it responsibly.