Spain: New Traditions, Deep Roots
Dear Member,
It’s been two years since we last sourced a Spanish collection. In preparation for this one, we looked back at our previous booklets and noticed a lot of waxing on about the past. In most places where vines grow—whether in Spain or elsewhere in the Old World—there tends to be a lot of past to talk about.
In this collection, we have a wine grown on the very same grounds where a world-famous Spanish writer wrote his most famous work (no, it’s not Don Quixote); another made in a 16th-century farmhouse, itself built over the foundations of an old Roman villa; and still another from a bodega that’s been making wine since 1395.
If you want to go back even further, one of our partner wineries gets its edge from a geological phenomenon called a petrocalcic horizon, created when water dissolves calcium carbonate found in the soil and carries it deep underground.
So we can’t claim this is a modernist collection, exactly. Yet with this 2024 Spanish collection, we sought out twists on tradition rather than its repetition: a Pinot Noir in Valencia, an earthy Cabernet (with a surprising secondary grape), a gentle Toro, and more.
In short, we looked for winemakers—generally operating on small plots by hand—who want to create their own traditions rather than go through motions created by someone else.
You’ll also notice that nearly every wine in this collection is organic (save one, which is made following traditional methods but without the organic label). That wasn’t intentional, but it does tend to work out that way with winemakers who genuinely care about wine as a living art, not a commercial commodity.
In This Box
You will find six bottles:
Hispano+Suizas Bassus Pinot Noir 2021
Alonso del Yerro 2019
Casado Morales EME Mazuelo 2015
Torelló Cava 2a 18/19
Vetus 2019
Mas Vilella 2021
With apologies that it has taken us so long to return to Iberia’s many delights…
Salud,
Will Bonner
Founder, Bonner Private Wine Partnership
