Mencía is one of two wines we had never heard of and that we fell in love with on our Spanish wine tasting trip.  It is lovely medium bodied red wine that generally sells for under $20.  We have tried a few that were in the $25-30 price range, and they are well worth that price, but the ones that were $12- 18 are Best Buys at that price.  Mencía was thought to be another descendant of Cabernet Franc, but DNA analysis proved that was not the case.  But I do think that Mencía shares several characteristics with Cabernet Franc. 

• It is a name that many people are not familiar with and have never tasted.
• It is delightful red wine at a very good price point.
• It is medium bodied with lots of flavor and complements a wide range of food dishes.
• Most retail stores will have a limited selection.  The very good wine stores like Calvert Woodley and MacArthur in DC, and the big online shops like Wine.com and Total Wine will have some good choices.  I found 46 Mencía wines available to me on Wine.com the day I wrote this post.

According to Wine Folly’s excellent web site, Mencía (“Men-thee-ah”) is a medium-bodied red wine grape that produces high quality wines with floral and red fruit flavors. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s not surprising, Mencía only grows in Spain and Portugal on the Iberian peninsula. What makes Mencía special is it has shown the ability to age like other fine wines and it offers rich aromas in the glass. If you love Pinot Noir and other aromatic reds (like Gamay or Schiava) then Mencía is something worth investigating. Mencía is labeled as Jaen (“jyne”) in Portugal.

Mencía vines are planted on about 22,000 acres in Spain in Castilla y Leon, east of Galicia where the Albariño wine in the first post came from.  The Bierzo DO is where most of the Mencía vineyards are located with some in the Ribeiro and Valdeorres DOs which are in Galacia.  Another 6,200 acres of Mencía is planted in Portugal, primarily in the Dow region.  

Mencía was primarily a light table wine for many years. Beginning early in the 20^th century a number of wine makers applied fine wine making techniques to the Mencía grapes which resulted in a medium body wine with great flavor and the popularity of that wine is now growing rapidly.  Some of the key actions that led to the significant improvement include:

• Vineyards planted on the south facing side of higher altitude hills.
• Pruning the vines to limit the yield to get grapes with more flavor.  In the Bierzo DO wine makers are allowed to harvest enough grapes to produce 20,000 liters per hectare.  But most of the wine makers that are producing good Mencía are trimming their vines to only produce 12,000 liters per hectare and for some of the premium Mencías, they only get 8,000 liters per hectare, so the grapes have much more flavor. 
• Nurturing old vines to produce smaller quantities of grapes with very rich flavors to be added to the gapes from vines in their peak growing years.
• Very little oak is used in the Mencía process as it can significantly impact the flavors in this medium body wine.  When it is used, the wine does have softer tannins. 

This excellent graphic on Mencía comes from Wine Folly.  The wine has a very pleasant flowery aromas with red fruit notes like raspberry, strawberry, cherry, and pomegranate.  While medium bodied, it has a deep red maroon color with fresh acidity and chalky tannins that you can taste but they are not at all dominant.  The taste is the red fruits that were in the aroma with some secondary notes of black peppercorns, violets, and some gravel minerality. 

We were introduced to Mencía in a visit to Cesar de Burbia in Bierzo and I have a number of pictures from that visit.  From our comfy bus we climbed onto a large flatbed truck and held on the ropes surrounding the truck bed as we drove up into the higher elevation hills to the vineyard where we tasted ripe grapes from the vines and listened to the wine maker talk about limiting the yields and being all organic in his approach. 

We then went back to the bus and went to the winery where were taken through their wine making process and then enjoyed six of their wines including the three Mencías recommended below.  The first one is their basic Mencía, the Hombros is the next step up, and the Tebaida Mencía is another level up wine where they trimmed the vines to further limit the yield of the harvest.  We loved all three and have gotten the Mencia and the Tebaida locally, but all the stores are now out of stock.  I suspect they are waiting for the 2021 vintage to ship.  I am enjoying the other wines in the list below while I wait for the Cesar de Burbia get back on the shelf.

Our tasting was at a long outdoor table in perfect weather, and they had a lovely spread of charcuterie and cheeses for us to enjoy with the wines.  We were poured a taste of each wine and the winemaker took us through that wine. At the end bottles were put on the table and passed around and we could have us much as we wanted of each of the wines.  It was a great tasting!  Two of the wines we tasted were their Godella wines, the other grape we had never heard of or tasted before this trip and that will be one of the other four Spanish wines that you might not have heard about that I will discuss in future posts. 

Recommended Mencía wines:

• Casar de Burbia Mencia – Bierzo. $15
• Casar de Burbia Hombros Mencia – Bierzo. $20
• Casar de Burbia Tebaida Mencia – Bierzo. $25

• Descendientes de Jose Palacios Petalos – Bierzo.  Consistently getting 93-95 points from multiple reviewers.  $27
• Bodegas Raul Perez Ultreia Saint Jacques – Bierzo.  Consistently getting 93-94 points from several reviewers.  $30
• Bodegas Rectoral de Amandi Matilda Nieves Mencia – Ribeiro.  91 points form several reviewers.  $20
• Bodegas Avancia Cuvee de O Mencia – Valdeorres.  Consistently getting 90-91 points from multiple reviewers.  $18
• Vinos de Arganza Lagar de Robla Premium Mencia – Bierzo.. $12
• Vinos de Arganza Flavium Premium Crianza Mencia – Bierzo.  $12
• Vinos de Arganza Alvarez de Toledo Mencia – Bierzo.  2020 got 91 points from JS and WW.  $14