ON WINE | JULY 2, 2010

A Spanish Dynasty Looks Forward

The wine giant Torres, a family affair, uses its big sellers to finance innovative single-vineyard cuvées

By JAY MCINERNEY

Pacs del Penedès, Spain

Most American wine lovers are familiar with the Judgment of Paris, the 1976 tasting in which several Napa wines outscored the best from Bordeaux and Burgundy. The French wine establishment was not amused. The spit buckets were still wet as the experts who’d participated in the blind tasting started to explain the results away. Patriotic French wine lovers must have been similarly riled three years later when a Spanish wine bested 1970 Château Latour and other top Bordeaux in another blind tasting sponsored by Gault Millau, the prestigious French food guide. The wine in question was a 1970 Torres Gran Coronas, made from four-year-old Cabernet vines planted in Penedès, an area of gently rolling hills an hour west of Barcelona.

At the time of Gault Millau’s so-called Wine Olympiad, Spain was best known for sherry and for the kind of rustic plonk that Sancho Panza and Ernest Hemingway’s expats used to squirt out of wine skins. Torres itself was best known for a mass-produced red with a plastic bull attached to the neck. A few hard-core connoisseurs were aware of a winery called Vega Sicilia, in Ribera del Duero, producing powerful, age-worthy reds, and Rioja produced some fine wines, but the general level of ambition and technical expertise was unimpressive. Thirty years later, Spain is the new Italy (which was, until recently, the new France, if you know what I mean). Every week a new boutique wine from a previously obscure part of Spain lands here with a big noise. But no winery is more innovative, or emblematic of recent Spanish history, than Torres.

The elegant, courtly Miguel Torres has mild blue eyes and dresses in the tweedy style of the English country gentry, also favored by the chatelains of Bordeaux. At the age of 68 he seems to retain a youthful sense of curiosity; he has recently decided to take up Japanese and holds his own in a conversation with his Japanese importer, whose annual visit to the sprawling winery complex in Penedès coincides with my own. He drives a Prius, which seems as much a testament to his modest demeanor as to his passion for environmental issues. He stopped using pesticides 20 years ago and he’s committed to reducing CO2 emissions at the winery 30% by 2020. He’s also bought land in the cooler highlands near the Pyrenees, in case global warming makes the lowland vineyards in Penedès too hot for viticulture in the future.

READ THE REST > Torres WSJ Article