In
1972, Donn Pohren, a Minneapolis-born American who lived in Spain for
decades and was the world's greatest foreign expert on flamenco,
published his idiosyncratic underground classic, Adventures in Taste: The Wines and Folk Food of Spain. I
was living in southern Spain when I first encountered Pohrens's book
(privately printed in Spain) soon after it was published and it had a
profound effect on me. In the early years, I never traveled without it.
At first, I merely wanted to have some of the wine and food experiences
that he had described. Soon, I was having new experiences of my own,
experiences that would eventually lead to my becoming a widely
published writer on Spanish wine and food and a recognized authority in
the field.
Donn Pohren's Adventures in Taste: The Wines and Folk Food of Spain
Adventures in Taste, self-published by Pohren in 1972.
Pohren
wandered around the Iberian Peninsula in the 1960s exploring the nooks
and crannies of Spain's 4,000,000 acres of vineyard lands, the largest
acreage of any country in the world. He would pop into a village bar,
ask for a glass of the local vino, then casually ask who made the best
wine in town. On many occasions, Pohren would soon find himself being
offered several samples as one vintner after another vied to show this
foreigner that his wine was the best in the village. In his book,
Pohren described encounter after encounter with artisan winemakers who
were making excellent wines, many of which were unknown to the outside
world in those days.
Pohren's Map of the Wine Regions of North Central
(He did not cover Galicia!)
However, many of the wines Pohren described were wines whose charm soon
faded if anyone tried to transport them beyond the boundaries of their
home region. The winemaking techniques were often primitive. In many
places the grapes were still crushed by treading, then fermented in open
stone or cement vats, and aged in less than meticulously cared for
barrels. The result was a flawed wine, which often tasted good with the
local food, but was simply not stable enough to "travel" and was not the
stuff to thrill sophisticated wine connoisseurs. Still, Don Pohren
swore by the inherent quality of many of these Spanish wines and he was
right.
His
experiences have always been in the back of my mind and have served me
well on numerous occasions, such as an encounter on my first trip to
then unknown Priorat in 1988. Firmly in Pohren's shoes, I entered an
old-fashioned, untidy cellar, where I was given a flawed wine to taste,
but the underlying base wine was clearly very good. I judged the
prospects for this region to be so promising that I came back wrote the
first major article about the potential of Priorat. Alvaro
Palacios and crew arrived the next year and began to make history.
Recently, in Ribeira Sacra, I have run into some flawed wines (less so
every year), just as a did in Priorat nearly twenty years earlier.
Tasting "underneath" the sometimes inexperienced wine making techniques,
I found enormous potential. I know Donn would have as well.
What Pohren tasted in those wines while researching his book forty years ago was the materia prima
(raw material; grapes, soil and climate), the exceptional juice from
grapes which often came from old vines, whose average yield of wine per
acre of vines was less than half that allowed by the best appellations
of Burgundy and Bordeaux. Even backward winemaking techniques
couldn't keep the underlying quality from showing through; Pohren's
Spanish wines were diamonds in the rough.
In
the years since Donn Pohren wrote his book, exciting things have
happened which promise an incredible future for both Spain's traditional
wines and those of emerging wine regions. Spain's nearly four
decades-old democracy has been the catalyst for a modern renaissance in
fashion, art, literature, cinema, and gastronomy and it has ushered in a
technological revolution in wine making as well. A key element in this
was Spain's acceptance in 1992 as a member of the European Economic
Community, the Common Market (now the European Union), which posed a
special challenge to Spanish wine producers: compete on a quality level
with the other wines of Europe or enter the over-saturated European wine
"lake," and be lost in the crowd.
Fortunately, Spain opted for quality. Many forward looking people in the
Spanish wine trade began to see Spain's entry into the European Union
as both a new challenge and a new opportunity for their wines. These
challenges and opportunities would require a reassessment of their
positions in both the domestic and export markets, an upgrading of their
winemaking technology, and consistent quality in their wines. Emile
Peynaud, Alexis Lichine, and other consultants were brought in from
France to advise winemakers in the Rioja, Ribera del Duero, and Rueda.
The best enologists from Rioja, Penedes, and Navarra traveled to other
regions share their expertise. Young Spanish winemakers trained in
Bordeaux, Burgundy, and at the University of California - Davis. Miguel
Torres Riera, the maestro of Catalan winemaking, and Jose Peñin, Spain's
foremost wine authority, wrote important books about Spain's future in
the wine world. New wine books, periodicals, and gourmet journals
proliferated. Seminars, international wine symposiums, and wine
competitions began to be conducted on a regular basis. And, importantly,
wine clubs and societies were formed as an increasingly affluent and
growing middle class in Spain began to appreciate the wines of its own
country.
During the past several decades, investments in new wine making technology
(especially in the area of fermentation control), better barrels (although accompanying by a lot of oak abuse!),
experiments with new grape varietals, and the replanting of vineyards in
some areas have begun to have a geometric effect on the overall quality
level of Spanish wines. This progress in winemaking technique in Spain
would not in itself account for such a dramatic effect–in fact, it is
now often a detriment to authenticity--if it were not for the fact that
Spain is a splendid natural vineyard endowed with many areas whose grape
varietals have become perfectly acclimated over centuries to the
micro-climate and soil in which they grow.
All
that was needed in many cases were winemakers dedicated to quality and
the technology to achieve it. The grapes produced in the best wine areas
of Spain–Rioja, Jerez, Cataluna, Ribera del Duero, Navarra, Rueda, and
in many up and coming regions–have shown they are capable of producing
wines which can stand alongside the best of France, Italy, and
California. The Tempranillo of the Rioja and Ribera del Duero, for
example, is coming to be recognized as a grape which can produce wines
to rival those made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Pinot Noir.
The established, classic wine regions of Spain like Rioja and Jerez,
while refining the techniques and polishing the skills which made them
famous, also created exciting new areas of interest with small estates
like Remelluri and Contino in Rioja and the emergence of such
high-quality wines as the almacenista sherries of Emilio Lustau and the
late harvest Navarra moscatels from Julián Chivite, Ochoa and Viña
Aliaga. Other areas whose wines were once underground legends in Spain,
like those described by Donn Pohren, but whose viticulture was based on
tiny artisan producers and ill-equipped cooperatives, began to realize
their potential for making great wines.
Ribera del Duero, home of Vega Sicilia, Pesquera, Mauro, and Viña
Pedrosa; Navarra, the producer of perhaps the world's finest rosés;
Priorato (Cataluna) and Toro (Castilla-Leon), whose rich, concentrated,
blockbuster red wines have drawn international attention; Rueda, a
surprising white wine region; and Rías Baixas, whose Albariños now count
the U.S. as its most important export market, are just the most visible
of the emerging wine regions capable of making first rate wine from
native grapes. There are many more to come.
Previously
unknown regions–not many of which unknown to Donn Pohren–such as
Bierzo, Ribeiro, Ribeira Sacra, Valdeorras and Monterrei, along with
Jumilla and many others–have either jumped onto the world wine stage or
are just in the wings awaiting their call to stardom. Producers like
Miguel Torres in Penedes, Julián Chivite in Navarra, Carlos Falcó at
Dominio de Valdepusa and Codorniu's Raimat estate, just to name a few
examples, have achieved new heights with foreign varietals, though even
the best examples often fall short of the intriguing, delicious,
uniquely Spanish wines made from indigenous varieties–the kinds of wines
that Donn Pohren loved.
Embedded in me like a memory chip is the spirit of Donn Pohren and his Adventures in Taste.
Following his example, I still ferret out little known producers and
drive many kilometers out-of-the-way just to eat a dish in a
little-known regional restaurant and, like Don, look beyond rusticity
(or fancy trappings in some places) to find the core of something that
is undeniably wonderful and unique to Spain. Only adventurers and
indefatigable travelers can do what Donn Pohren did. I can attest to how
indefatigable and adventurous he was from averaging six trips a year to
Spain (eight per year in the past five years).
Without Don Pohren’s book (and to a great degree, James A. Michener’s Iberia) I may have never caught the spirit of the Spanish road that has sustained me now for more than 50 years. For
that I owe Donn a now un-redeemable debt of gratitude and so do people
such as Steve Metzler, who built a great and exemplary Spanish wine
importing company, Classical Wines, based on his Pohren-inspired wine
travels. Because of Donn, Metzler was inspired to find not only Pesquera
and make Alejandro Fernandez's wine world famous, he even met his wife,
Almudena. Neither of us saw Don Pohren as much as we would have liked
to over the years, but fortunately several years ago in Madrid, I had an
opportunity to let Donn know just how much his work meant to me and to
the many who carry Spain in their hearts.
Pohren visited my late former wife Diana and I for lunch at our house in Mijas (Málaga) in 1974.
Donn autographed Adventures in Taste to us.
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