The other day I was at a wine tasting hosted by Daniel Landi and Fernando García, who together make wine as Comando G in the mountainous Sierra de Gredos region of central Spain.
It was a big event, attended by lots of expectant writers, somms and buyers in the UK wine trade, and framed as a sort of 'Gredos has arrived' declaration. They even prefaced it with the epochal intro to Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’. It felt like we were about to witness The Ascension.
To be serious though, Dani and Fer are totally justified in making such a declaration, and precisely the people to do it. What that have achieved since they started Comando G in 2008 is probably the most dramatic success story in the modern era of Spanish wine.
Their instinct, hard work and dedication has created a bona fide fine wine region – one now lionised by wine geeks and collectors around the world – out of a land that, until they came along, lay abandoned.
Dani set the context in his introduction to the tasting. He explained how in the early 2000s while working for his family’s company, Bodegas Jiménez-Landi, about 40km south in Méntrida, he started to look north to the high-altitude terroir of Gredos:
"Twenty-five years ago, I planted my first vineyard on land that nobody else believed in. No-one knew anything about Gredos. No-one even called Gredos 'Gredos'. It had no name. There was no narrative. It was a region in black and white, lost in the wine world.”
The ‘G’ in Comando G is a threefold ‘G’, standing for Gredos, its granite soils and the garnacha grape.
These are garnachas the like of which you won't find anywhere else in the world. They are ethereal yet earthy, telluric, having more in common with the best Pinots of Burgundy’s Côte d’Or than anything else.
They are a resounding confirmation of Dani and Fer’s original hunch when scouting for vineyards back in the early 2000s: that Gredos is an extraordinary terroir (or complex of terroirs) that can produce red wines whose elusive perfume and mesmerising textures leave you fumbling for superlatives.
Dani pointed out that, when he and Fer first visited the region, it was at a time before smartphones. There was no easy navigation with Google Maps, no online guides, no drones to survey the land. They were more or less on their own and in analogue.
"We spent years exploring the mountains by car or on foot,” he told us at the tasting, “discovering abandoned vineyards, without knowing what kind of wines we would make, without any references to producers who had previously made wines in the area."
Fer described Gredos as a mountain region “that seems frozen in time”. Its 2,000ha of vineyards are defined by three things: high-elevation climate, predominantly granite soils and the garnacha grape. This combination factors can produce high-quality, mineral red wines that are unique in the wine world.
Gredos is about an hour's drive south to north, surrounded by mountains and intersected by two rivers (the Alberche and the Teitar). It contains four valleys (as seen in the map above), all providing unique terroirs for the grapes cultivated there:
- Bajo Alberche in the south, a landscape of meadows, vineyards, olive trees and wheat, with a warm and dry continental climate and where the soils are mostly sandstone.
- Valle de Teitar in the west, characterised by moderate temperatures, high rainfall, a humid Mediterranean climate and deep, fertile granitic soils.
- Valle Central to the east, with a Mediterranean climate, high temperatures and lower rainfall, pine and olive trees, and vineyards planted on granite and slate soils.
- Alto Alberche in the north, above the Gredos range, with chestnut and oak forests, vineyards up to 1,200m elevation, high rainfall, lower temperatures than the rest of the region and rocky granite soils.
The tasting was not intended as a chronicle of Comando G’s achievements over the past two decades, rather as an introduction to the generation that has succeeded Dani and Fer. From nothing, there are now more than 50 wine projects spread across the Gredos region, several of the most interesting of which were presenting their wines at this tasting.
First there was Vitícola Mentridana, the project of Dani’s old schoolfriend, Curro Barreño. Curro is best known as one half of the Ribeira Sacra project Fedellos de Couto. His wines are quite special.
Second was A Pie de Tierra from young winemakers Aitor Paul and David Villamiel. Then came Indiano, based in Cebreros and run by Argentinian Macarena Nogara, her French partner Charly Gotchac and Spaniard José Maria García Jiménez.
Then came El Reventón, an 'off-grid' project established by Adrianna Catena, of Catena Zapata fame in Argentina, along with winemaker Alejandro Virgil and retired Irish engineer Gearóid Lane.
They were followed by La Pedreras, set up by winemaker Bárbara Requejo (ex Haut-Brion, Pierre Péters) and her partner, and Gredos native, Guzmán Sánchez. Then another Cebreros project, Rico Nuevo, from fourth-generation Gredos viticultor Juanan Martín (mentored by Dani Landi).
Finally, my old friends Niepoort Vinhos (I made my first wine with them in Bairrada, Portugal, in 2018). They are now making Gredos wines through their Niepoort Iberia project.
All of them were interesting for different reasons. Few wines hit the heights of Comando G’s, but whatever the style and whatever the quality, they all shared an almost magical Gredos feel, a simultaneous weightlessness and adamantine strength on the palate.
The best was saved for last: it was a 2017 Comando G Rozas 1er Cru poured from magnum. It was as good as many top mature cru Burgundies that I have tasted.
If you haven’t tried Gredos garnacha before, seek out these wines and find out for yourself what makes them so special. I stock Comando G’s ‘village’ wine, La Bruja de Rozas, and have a small allocation of their other bottlings (email me if interested – darren@tfwath.com). I’m also going to be sourcing some of Curro’s Mentridana cuvées.
These are wines for which the word ‘ethereal’ seems to have been made and which, thanks to Dani and Fer, have transformed Gredos from a forgotten region into one of the world’s great wine terroirs.
Photo credits: apart from photo of the bottle line-up, which was taken by my Les Caves rep, Doug, all the photos here belong to Dani and Fer and are taken from the booklet they provided at the tasting.