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Synthetic corks may intrigue New Zealanders but don't mention the idea to Maria Martinez-Sierra. After 27 years making wines at Bodegas Montecillo in Spain's Rioja Alta, she's not keen on trendy.
It's part national pride. Spain, Martinez-Sierra will have you know, produces its own cork in cold, rugged country where trees take seven years to produce one crop of bark.
Mostly, she is displaying the fierce protection of a proud parent. Like many winemakers, Martinez-Sierra refers to the wines as her children. She's not going to trust them to anything as flimsy as a plastic cork. It would be like suggesting to a mother tiger that the zoo has a nice day care center.
She'd prefer to keep her favorite child, the 1982 from one of Spain's great vintages, carefully sheltered. Now almost 22, this sophisticated red is perhaps ready to leave home; the 1981 is not. "Making very long-lived wines we have to be very careful about how to cork them. It's important for me to have that protection." The stopper is just the final step for a winery so painstaking that it makes its own barrels.
Tasting through 20 years of Spanish wines that Martinez-Sierra brought on a recent trip to Tampa Bay, corks were beside the point - as they should be.
What had been preserved under them were elegant reminders that the great virtues and value of Spanish wine remains the same, despite decades of modernization, hype and the presumptuous claims that the New World has now "discovered" Spain.
In the post-Franco awakening, flashy stainless steel has replaced old oak vats, and merlot and chardonnay crowd out traditional grapes to make popular international wines. Many have shed their Spanish accent of too much tannin, and cult favorites sell for $100 and more.
Spain has been a major wine producer since the Romans, and its great wines have been the same for 100 years.
The best Spanish wines are made from distinctive local grapes, particularly tempranillo, also known as tinto fino. The greatest vineyards are in the Rioja near the Basque country just across the French border from Bordeaux and in the Ribera del Duero northwest of Madrid.
In bottle and style, the Spanish reds look like a Bordeaux but taste more like a burgundy, elegant and still earthy, their cherry and plum flavors spiced with licorice, cedar and smoke. They are aged longer in the winery and live longer in the cellar even if they cost $10 or less.
And some of the most reliable names, such as Montecillo, have been there all along, back when the only Spanish wines found outside the bodegas were on dusty bottom shelves.
There are others, such as Vega Sicilia, the legendary grandee of Riberam sought by connoisseurs for decades. Yet even there, Vega Sicilia's Pablo Alvarez warns against a fascination with the new.
"Twenty years ago, there were 12 wineries in Ribera; now there are 200." He, himself, has invested in a still more traditional area, the tokay cellars of Hungary.
Similar cautions come from Steven Metzler, the Seattle importer who has spearheaded the rediscovery of Spanish wines such as the Ribera's Pesquera through the Classical Wines label.
"We are traditionalists and always have been, arguing for natural acidity and elegance, which is the trademark of great Rioja (and the secret to its ageworthiness)," he explained in an e-mail. "The trend toward New World style has skewed views of Rioja as it has in Burgundy . . . an entire wave of "vanguard' Riojas (and others) is obliterating authenticity."
These new wines want to taste like Californians, too ripe and overoaked, and some do at half the price. But the explorer will search old Spain for its true tastes, flowery whites like albarino and lively reds made from garnacha, monastrell and carignane grapes.
The happy balance at the beginning of the century is that most Spanish wines, even from traditionalist wineries, are ready to drink at a much younger age, yet they retain their great longevity and value.
There is no cheaper way to fill a cellar and savor the slow passage of time.
- Chris Sherman, who writes about food and wine for the St. Petersburg Times, is the author of "The Buzz on Wine" Lebhar-Friedman Books, $16.95. He can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com