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Keeping It In The Family By AJ Linn
Most people think the wine trade is a fun thing to be involved in and, while having to admit it is probably less boring than many businesses, the novelty can soon wear off. Neal Martin’s tweets regularly feature photographs of the wines he has to taste on any given day, and there are mornings when as many as fifty opened bottles are laid out in rows pending his opinion. Neal Martin, by the way, is one of Britain’s leading experts and was recently nominated to take over Burgundy and Bordeaux as part of wine guru Robert Parker’s retirement plan. There are only so many times you can tour a winery without stifling a yawn or three – because they are all the same. At least in “the old days” there were wooden barrels and a horny-handed son of the soil to draw samples from them. Now it’s all stainless steel and white laboratory coats. Nor is it unusual to visit a bodega and ne’er see a barrel, or even a bottle until you get to the tasting room. Which is why what you can loosely refer to as the genuine thing is fun, even though it had been shown to be more of a hit-and-miss method of making wine than stacked butts and earth floors. The Gil Vera family started off like that in the Murcia region of Spain, home of Jumilla wine. As with practically every wine region in Europe, local producers sold their wine at the bodega door to all-comers and didn’t start bottling it and sending it outside their hometowns until much later. And while the Monastrell grape, the trademark variety of this area (Mourvèdre in France), gave wines high in alcohol and dark in colour, Jumilla was an acquired taste, and even now there is still a small body of wine drinkers that turn their noses up at wines from this region. Even Jancis Robinson, arguably another of Britain’s most qualified wine experts, admitted recently she had underestimated the potential of the Monastrell grape until now. While the Tempranillo, Spain’s flagship variety, gives us wines from cooler regions such as the Rioja and Ribera del Duero, Monastrell is a hot-climate grape, and was used previously to add colour and alcohol to weaker wines from other regions. The Gil Vera family must take a large part of the credit for putting Jumilla wines in the quality tables. Although the family had been making wine in Murcia since the early 1900s, it was not until Miguel Gil, who as a budding technocrat had left for Sevilla to train as an aeronautical engineer, returned home to join the family firm that the business took off. The fourth generation is currently in charge and they sell 7.5 million bottles of wine annually. Anxious to spread their influence to all Spain, the original family bodega now forms part of a group that controls eight wineries the length and breadth of the country, from Rías Baixas to Almansa. The striking design of the labels and the markedly progressive approach to marketing sets this bodega apart, but the really winning features are the excellent quality and the reasonable prices. Starting with the Muscatel Seco, an unusually striking dry white that is more luscious than many prize-winning Chardonnays, the price is only €6.40 retail. The remaining four wines are all red Monastrells, the youngest being a four-monther at €6. The 12-month wine is €10.60 and the 18-month €21. No nonsense here about crianzas, reservas and the like. What you see is what you get, the range completed by an organic red, Honoro Vera, at €5.35. These are not supermarket wines, but are easy to find online or direct from the bodega (www.gilfamily.es).
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30/04/15 19:24