Wine of the Week: Tapena Garnacha

Wine: Tapena Garnacha

Grape: Garnacha

Region: La Tierra de Castilla, central Spain

Vintage: 2010

Price: $6.99

Availability: Lee's Discount Liquor

In the glass: Tapena wine is a deep garnet-red color with deep opaque streaks at the core, and a garnet to tinged-red rim definition with medium-high viscosity.

On the nose: The wine is full of pure extracted crushed peppery black fruit, ripe blueberries, boysenberry sauce and spicy vanilla extract from oak, then notes of allspice and tobacco, soft jammy berry components and a touch of smoke, licorice root and earthy minerals underlying.

On the palate: This wine is big and spicy at first, then juicy in the mouth with nicely complex concentrated chewy blackberry fruit, licorice root, crushed brambleberries, pepper-laced minerals, and then soft almost chewy tannins going into a well-balanced midpalate that is very smooth, although it retains a sense of freshness from the relatively forward acidity. The finish is a very deep fruity and really nice mouth-feel, one that lasts for 20-plus seconds and shows why wines made from garnacha are really much more profound to taste than to smell, from a concentration point of view.

Odds and ends: Spanish wines are some of the greatest bargains in the market. A quick examination of many restaurant lists finds that — with the exception of the great establishments run by my good friend Julian Serrano — they are really missing out on this action.

Spanish wines used to be all the rage in the United States when influential wine critic Robert Parker Jr. was a huge fan and proponent of the wines coming from the Iberian Peninsula. Lots of high-scoring wines made for a booming market in top Spanish wines, but then much like Australian wines, everything took a turn for the worse. A combination of the then-high euro against the dollar, increased interest in domestically produced wines primarily from California and Washington, and shifting trends saw the decline in the Spanish wine fortunes in this country.

Don't get me wrong, there is still a tremendous number of superb Spanish wines available in most wine retail stores, but the sheer selection has dwindled to a few hundred, when it used to be thousands.

Tapena is a superb little wine made from the ancient Spanish garnacha grape. Garnacha was later successfully adopted as Grenache in France and California, but this wine is an overachiever and a bargain in an attractive packaging. It is a wine that demands steak in any form or shape, and it is approaching its full maturity plateau, so drink it now through 2018.

— Gil Lempert-Schwarz's wine column appears on Wednesdays. Write him at P.O. Box 50749, Henderson, NV 89106-0749, or email him at gil@winevegas.com.