By Grant Turvey, with Xavier, who helps us curate the list.
Spain, one bottle at a time
Most bars and restaurants in Melbourne that pour Spanish wine stop at a Cava, a Rioja and an Albariño. Añada's list runs to 80-odd wines from 22 regions, and every one of them is Spanish. That is deliberate. Añada is a long-standing Spanish restaurant on Gertrude Street, and the list is built to do one thing well: show how much more there is to Spain than the three or four names everyone knows.
The list works in three layers. There is a base in every category, a bottle you can order without thinking twice and enjoy with anything on the table. There is a step up, where the grape or the place starts to show itself. And there are the extremes: single vineyards, very old vines, wines made in tiny numbers or in ways almost nobody else bothers with.
Spain has more vineyard than any other country, yet knowledge of Spanish wine is a bit thin on the ground here. So every bottle on our list carries a line of explanation. It's sometimes a bit quippy, but the line says why the wine is there. Some of those reasons are about taste. Many are about people: families who have farmed the same slopes for centuries, growers who walked out of co-ops to bottle their own wine, and winemakers who came home after training in Bordeaux and Burgundy.
How the list is built
The base of the list comes through a small group of importers who know Spain best, Soul Wines, Alimentaria and Bibendum among them. They bring in the reliable, well-made bottles that a list like this needs: the Albariños, the young Riojas, the Verdejos and Mencías that pour well every night and sit easily with the food.
From that base, the list reaches for the things importers bring in by the case rather than the pallet. Ten wines arrived in September in small numbers, some in two or three bottles: a single-parcel Albariño, two serious Godellos, a single-site Rioja Alavesa, and a Mencía from a vineyard so steep the grapes come up by cable. When they are gone, they are gone, and something else takes their place.
We pay attention to that balance. A list made only of rarities is a museum, and one made only of safe wines is a bottle-shop shelf. Añada sits deliberately between the two, so that a table can order a familiar Rioja and still be one page-turn away from something they have never seen.
Sparkling: from Cava to Corpinnat
The base is Lacrima Baccus, a bone-dry Brut Nature Cava made from the three classic Penedès grapes, Macabeo, Xarel·lo and Parellada, with nothing sweet added at the end. It comes from Cavas Lavernoya, founded by the Raventós Poch family in 1890 and one of the oldest wineries in the Penedès. Its pink sibling, Garnacha with a little Pinot Noir, is the bottle to put next to a bowl of olives.
The extreme is Recaredo's 'Terrers'. In 2019 Recaredo was one of the houses that walked out of the Cava appellation to form Corpinnat, a group with stricter rules: organic, hand-picked estate fruit and long ageing. 'Terrers' spends more than three years on its lees, and the result is closer to a fine mist than a fizz, with citrus, sea salt and the smell of a sourdough crust.
For the curious there is a third path, the pet-nats from Entre Vinyes. They finish fermenting in the bottle, so they arrive cloudy and softly fizzy, one pink and one white. The estate is run by Maria Barrena and Pep Tort, who turned an old chicken coop and pigsty into a signature winery.
Whites: thirty bottles, four Spains
Whites make up nearly 40% of the list, which surprises people who think of Spain as red-wine country. Largely because of its climate and the way it eats, Spain has built a great variety of tastes and textures across its white wines. This section is built around four very different Spanish landscapes.
The Atlantic. Galicia's Rías Baixas is cool, wet and salty, and Albariño is its grape. The base is Ophalum, made by Paco y Lola, a co-op of more than 430 Salnés Valley growers. The step is a run of family houses, each with its own story. Santiago Ruiz's label map began as a napkin sketch his daughter drew in 1965 to guide guests to her wedding. The founder of Pentecostés made his fortune in Galicia's fishing industry and retired to plant vines in his home village. Terras Gauda, whose name means "land of happiness", owns almost all the Caíño Blanco left in the region and blends it in. The extremes are Zárate, founded in 1707 under a royal decree from Felipe V and the oldest Albariño on the list, and Nanclares y Prieto's single-parcel 'Soverribas', from the economist who sailed to Galicia and turned his garage into a winery.
Inland, Albariño gives way to Godello, the grape for anyone who finds Albariño a little sharp: think Riesling against Chardonnay. It runs from Viña Somoza's 'Neno', aged on its lees for texture, through Mengoba's mountain Godellos, to two of the most serious whites in Spain. Castro Ventosa's 'El Val' comes from the Pérez family, on record making wine in Bierzo since 1752. Rafael Palacios' 'As Sortes' is the wine he left his family's Priorat estate to make: small granite plots high in the Bibei Valley, and the benchmark for the grape. Alongside them sits a Basque Txakoli from a farmhouse built in 1852 in a surf village near Bilbao, and Quinta da Muradella's 'Candea', made by a grower who has spent his career bringing back Galician grapes nobody else wanted.
Rioja. White Rioja is one of the great overlooked wines, and the list shows its range. Manuel Quintano's Blanco is the clean, simple base. Luis Cañas adds Malvasía for perfume. Then come the extremes: Familia Chávarri's 'Larchago', eight years old, from a winery founded in 1882; Valenciso's barrel-fermented white from vines more than a century old; and Exopto's 'El Bernate', a tiny plot of Malvasía Riojana fermented in a concrete egg.
Rueda. Verdejo is the white Spain drinks at home. Cuatro Rayas, a co-op of about 300 families founded in 1935, is the base. Ángel Rodríguez's 'Martínsancho' is the history lesson: he is credited with keeping old-vine Verdejo alive in Rueda. Miguel Arroyo's 'Demimo', from vines over a century old, shows what the grape does with a year or two in bottle.
The Mediterranean and the edges. Terra Alta grows more Garnacha Blanca than anywhere on earth, and Edetària's 'Via Terra' is named for the Roman road that ran past the vineyards. Priorat barely makes white wine, which is why Terroir al Límit's 'Històric' is on the list. There is even a Chardonnay from Jumilla, red-wine country, grown high enough on the plateau to stay fresh, and two skin-contact whites for the adventurous: El Galayo's Albillo Real from the granite of the Sierra de Gredos, and Entre Vinyes' 'Sotaterra', aged in clay amphorae buried among the vines, hence the name, Catalan for 'under the earth'.
Rosado and clarete
Spanish pink wine is drier and more serious than its reputation. The base is Sierra del Toloño, made by Sandra Bravo, who trained in Bordeaux, Chianti, Marlborough and Priorat before coming home to farm bush vines at 650 metres in Labastida. Tim Atkin named her his Young Winemaker of the Year in 2019. Manuel Quintano's Labastida Rosado, Garnacha picked for freshness rather than colour, sits alongside.
The step is Exopto's rosado, darker and chewier, a pink wine for the table that has already ordered the morcilla. The extreme is not strictly a rosado at all. Pícaro del Águila's 'Clarete' revives an old Ribera del Duero tradition of fermenting red and white grapes together. Its maker, Jorge Monzón, trained at Romanée-Conti and Vega Sicilia, then went home and put the old word back on the label. It has real tannin and drinks like a light red.
Reds: from Rioja to the volcano
Forty-plus reds, and the deliberate point is that only a third of them are the traditional Rioja.
Rioja. The base comes from Labastida, where the story of Rioja's oak begins. The Manuel Quintano range is named for an 18th-century priest who went to Bordeaux and brought its barrel-ageing methods home, and the Crianza and 'El Pionero' carry that history. Exopto, founded by a Bordeaux-born former rugby player, and Artuke, whose name joins the first names of brothers Arturo and Kike de Miguel, show the young, un-oaked side. The step is where modern and traditional sit side by side: Valenciso's 'Cemento', Tempranillo raised in concrete with no oak at all, against López de Haro's glossy 'El Pacto' and Marqués de Vargas' polished Reserva. Then the classics. La Rioja Alta was founded in 1890 by five families in Haro's railway district, and 'Viña Ardanza' and 'Viña Arana' side by side are the quickest education in traditional Rioja there is. The extreme is Artuke's single-site 'El Escolladero', from the winemakers Rioja is currently talking about.
The Duero. Further west, Tempranillo goes by other names and grows darker. In Toro it is Tinta de Toro: Estancia Piedra's organic wines come from an estate that holds a vineyard planted in the early 1900s, and the Matsu labels are real photographs of local growers, the young 'Pícaro' and the weathered 'Recio' matched to the age of the vines. Telmo Rodríguez, Spain's great vineyard hunter, made 'Dehesa Gago' to understand Toro's old bush vines. In Ribera del Duero, Bardos comes from vines above 950 metres, and the Conde de San Cristóbal is made by the same family as the Marqués de Vargas. Order the two together and you have the whole Rioja and Ribera argument in two glasses.
Mencía country. In Bierzo and Ribeira Sacra the grape is Mencía, Spain's answer to Cabernet Franc. Mengoba's 'Brezo' is the everyday base. Descendientes de J. Palacios' 'Villa de Corullón', from the project Álvaro Palacios started with his nephew Ricardo Pérez in 1998, is the wine that made the world take Bierzo seriously. In Ribeira Sacra the vineyards hang above the Sil river. Guímaro means "rebel" in Galician, the nickname of the winemaker's grandfather. The extreme is Sílice's 'Finca Lobeiras', from a slope that drops 130 metres to the river, so steep that the grapes are hauled up by cable at harvest.
Garnacha and the east. Aragon is Garnacha's home ground. Care redesigns its label every vintage through a contest for young designers. Jorge Navascués makes 'Cutio' as his personal project alongside his role as technical manager at Rioja's Contino. Frontonio's 'Microcósmico' comes from Fernando Mora, an engineer turned Master of Wine whose MW research was on Garnacha. Luzador, "a warrior of the sun", brings Navarra into the mix.
The south. Two grapes most diners have never heard of. Bobal is one of the most planted grapes in Spain and almost unknown outside it, and Juan Antonio Ponce's 'La Casilla' is the wine that gave it a reputation. Monastrell (Mourvèdre in France) runs from the Pacheco family's organic bottle, from a winery founded with a home wine press in 1948, to Bodega Cerrón's 'Remordimiento', which means regret: the family's answer to whether they should give up their old vines. At the top sits Casa Castillo's 'Las Gravas'. The cellar was built in the 1870s by French owners fleeing phylloxera, and it is the bottle a wine buff might spot from across the room.
The islands. Phylloxera never reached the Canaries. Suertes del Marqués' '7 Fuentes' comes from vines on their own roots in volcanic rock on Tenerife: smoky, light and like nothing else on the list.
By the glass, and the sherry bar
Twelve wines are open every night, chosen so a table can travel without committing to a bottle: the Cava, a Txakoli from the Basque coast, Martínsancho Verdejo, Albariño, a Rioja white with the oak left out, a pale rosado, the buried-amphora 'Sotaterra', two Bobals, a young Rioja, a Bierzo Mencía and a Labastida Crianza.
Añada is as much a sherry bar as a wine bar. The glass list runs from Bodega Barrero's 'Gabriela' Manzanilla and Lustau's 'Jarana' Fino through a Manzanilla en Rama and Sánchez Romate's 'NPU' Amontillado, then to Pedro Ximénez, including Toro Albalá's 'Don PX' Gran Reserva from the 1988 vintage. Spanish vermut on ice, from Terra Alta, Tarragona and Galicia, is the way to start the evening.
If you're familiar with French wine
White Burgundy and Chablis. Start with Godello. Viña Somoza's 'Neno' has the texture of lees ageing without any oak. The finds are Rafael Palacios' 'As Sortes', which has the breadth and slow reveal of good Meursault, and Valenciso's barrel-fermented white Rioja, creamy and salty, from vines over a hundred years old.
Champagne. Recaredo's 'Terrers' is the bottle for a grower-Champagne drinker: estate fruit, years on lees and no sugar added.
Red Burgundy. Start with Mencía, César Márquez's 'Parajes', fine-grained and stony. The finds are 'Villa de Corullón' from the slate slopes of Bierzo, and Sílice's 'Finca Lobeiras', a single plot of whole-bunch Mencía above the Sil. In Rioja, Valenciso's Reserva is the silkiest Tempranillo on the list.
Bordeaux. Rioja owes its barrels to Bordeaux, via a Labastida priest in the 18th century. Start with Manuel Quintano's 'El Pionero', then move to La Rioja Alta's 'Viña Arana' Gran Reserva for structure and age.
The Rhône and Bandol. Grenache is Garnacha and Mourvèdre is Monastrell. Start with Frontonio's 'Microcósmico', then go to Casa Castillo's 'Las Gravas', Monastrell that stays light on its feet.
Provence rosé. Sierra del Toloño: the same pale colour, more texture, less peach.
And to compare with Aussie wine
Clare and Eden Valley Riesling. Start with Albariño: Ophalum, salty and mouthwatering, or the Gorrondona Txakoli if you like it very dry. The find is Familia Chávarri's 'Larchago', an eight-year-old white Rioja that has gone where aged Riesling goes, with nuts in place of lime.
Chardonnay. Start, a little cheekily, with Spanish Chardonnay: Bodega Cerrón's 'Remordimiento', grown high on the Jumilla plateau. Then move to Godello, Mengoba's 'Godello Viejo' from old vines in Bierzo, and the finds, 'As Sortes' and Castro Ventosa's 'El Val'.
Barossa Shiraz. Toro is the closest thing in Spain. Start with Estancia Piedra's young organic Toro, then Matsu's 'El Recio', from vines 90 to 100 years old. For something warmer and more savoury, try the Monastrell from Jumilla, and if the occasion calls for it, 'Las Gravas'.
McLaren Vale Grenache. Garnacha is the same grape on its home ground. Start with Bodegas Aragonesas' 'Don Ramón', warm and easy, then Jorge Navascués' 'Cutio' and Frontonio's 'Microcósmico', grown high and cold, perfume first.
Yarra and Mornington Pinot Noir. Go to Ribeira Sacra. Guímaro's young Mencía is pale, floral and almost salty. The find is Suertes del Marqués' '7 Fuentes' from Tenerife, light, smoky and grown on its own roots in volcanic rock.
Natural and skin-contact wine. Start with the Entre Vinyes pet-nats, then 'Sotaterra' from its buried amphorae and El Galayo's Albillo Real from the Gredos granite. For a red in the same spirit, Care's Nouveau, young Garnacha and Syrah with no ceremony.
Come and drink your way through it
The full list, with a line on every bottle, is on our wine list page. Book on OpenTable or call (03) 9415 6101, and ask the floor team where to start.
More from Añada: What makes a great paella? and Basque food in Melbourne.
