La Maldita Espumante

Description

Garnacha had once been the most beloved and revered variety in the wine world for a few decades. It resisted diseases that other grapes could not endure and served as the backbone of the most popular and admired wine—the queen of varieties. The challenges of cultivation and winemaking, however, caused it to lose ground to Tempranillo. Many Garnacha vines were uprooted, with more than 50 % of its plantings disappearing in just a few years. A similar fate befell Garnacha blanca: while the original variety was largely removed, the white grape barely survived the dominance of Viura, ranking among Rioja’s white varieties with the smallest plantings—247 ha in 2022. In 2016, after years of effort, Viñedos La Maldita rescued the grape from oblivion and revived it with its first white. With the 2021 harvest, they became the sole winery to produce a sparkling Rioja using this variety, which we present here.