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Empordà revisited

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Jancis Robinson
Thursday 9 September 2021
Emporda bottles on chessboard, Almadraba

A Spanish seaside wine region worth investigating. Above, all the bottles tasted, arranged by Ferran on the draughts board at Almadraba Park Hotel, Roses.

Empordà is a small wine region, in the hinterland of the Costa Brava in the far north-east of Spain, but it deserves to be better known. The grape varieties most commonly planted in its 1,821 hectares (4,500 acres) of vineyard are almost equal total areas of about 400 ha (990 acres) each of Grenache/Garnacha (called Lledoner or Lladoner Negre locally) and Carignan (Carinyena Negre). There are parallels here, surely, with Priorat.

But perhaps the most obvious...