There seems to be a bit of a fad right now for talking about white wines that age. And I can see the motivation: winemakers who produce more carefully crafted whites need to justify the cost and show how they stand out from their competitors. That said, often youth is exactly what you want in a wine, particularly in a crisp, dry white.
The wine that prompted this train of thought was a six-year-old 2009 albariño I tried recently from Galician producer Mar de Frades. Its young winemaker, Paula Fandiño, is experimenting with ageing her wines on the lees of subsequent vintages, which gives them complexity and remarkable freshness. It’s all very impressive and clever, but what I like about albariño is what I find appealing in other similarly dry, sharp-tasting wines such as chablis, muscadet and picpoul: that pure, clean flavour and its affinity with raw shellfish (albariño is a coastal wine, after all). You can get hold of the Mar de Frades 2014 (12.5% abv), in its distinctive blue bottle, at £15.45 from drinkfinder.co.uk.
All that said, you can drink wines too young, before their flavours have fully developed. Even though 2015 is a better vintage than 2014, a year when the Rías Baixas denomination suffered more than its fair share of the heavy rainfall that habitually besets the region, it’s still a bit of a baby. When I tried another lineup of albariños the other week, the vintage showing best was the 2013, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for bin-ends of that. Or hang on to the 2015s until the summer, or even next year.
While the lively Bienbebido Pulpo Albariño 2015 (on offer at £7.99 or, even cheaper, £6.49 on a “mix six” deal at Majestic, £9.99 Wine Rack; 12.5% abv) is fair enough for the price, a more complex wine such as Terra de Asorei 2015 (£10.95, Gerrard Seel; 12.5% abv) will definitely benefit from a few months longer in the bottle. (The 2013, incidentally, was just gorgeous.) I found the Most Wanted Albariño 2014 (£6.99 Bargain Booze, £7.99 Co-op; 12.5% abv) a bit rough around the edges when it was released, but it’s definitely better now: that’s a good one for pinot grigio lovers to move on to, I feel.
Portugal’s vinho verde region over the border also produces albariño, though there it goes under the name of alvarinho. The 2015 vintage of Soalheiro, a wine I always like, is well worth snapping up for £8.55 at Prestige Wines Portugal (12.5% abv), not least because it costs almost twice that elsewhere. This, too, would benefit from being tucked away, even for a short while – it’s perfect for an August beach holiday.
