Juan Gil can grow grapes in Jumilla without irrigation thanks to old gobelets. They rely on the self-regulating power of indigenous grape varieties.
Monastrell is a real survival artist. Even here, 80 kilometers from the coastal town of Alicante in the outback of Murcia, where apart from a few bushes hardly anything can survive without artificial irrigation, the old gobelets carry juicy berries and green leaves. When I visited Jumilla in September, it hadn’t rained for months. It rarely rains more than 300 milliliters per square meter per year, about a third as much as in Burgundy. Almost all of it falls in winter and spring, and most of it seeps away quickly through the coarse, gravelly soil.
The Juan Gil winery is a wine estate group and currently cultivates more than 750 hectares spread over ten bodegas in Jumilla, Calatayud, Montsant, Rioja, Castilla y León, Rueda, Galicia, La Mancha and Aragón. Very few of their almost 100 wines have Juan Gil in their name, which is why the group’s activity is not always obvious. As my main aim is to highlight the potential of the wonderful Monastrell grape variety, I will not go into detail about all the bodegas. In short, they all do a good job and all represent a modern, approachable and very sociable style.
Although the roots of the Gils as a wine-growing family go back to 1916, the company in its current form was founded in 2001 by the brothers Miguel and Angel Gil. Jumilla’s dark wines did not have a great reputation back then. Almost without exception, they were sold in bulk to large wineries and the wines were considered rustic, suitable for blending or for drinking in taverns. The fact that Jumilla is on the radar of a wider public today can be attributed not least to the commitment of the Gils.
The Juan Gil trio
In the Juan Gil headquarters, as usual in fast-rising regions, many things are happening at the same time. On the one hand, thousands of old gobelets grow around the winery, many of them around a hundred years old and ungrafted. Phylloxera never made it as far as the arid, stony north-east of Jumilla. On the other hand, only the latest equipment is used in the cellar. Gentle vibrating belts instead of aggressive augers transport the grapes. A fully automatic optical sorting machine detects stems, leaves and unripe green grapes with precise cameras and separates them from the ripe berries with millimeter precise air pressure shots. Cross-flow is used for efficient and gentle filtration.
The wines are correspondingly pure and clean, even without much sorting in the vineyard, huge quantities and fairly moderate prices. The Yellow Label Monastrell is available for less than ten euros and is sold as a staple in many Spanish bars and restaurants. For good reason! You get a very authentic wine for little money, which well reflects the extremes of the terroir. Sure, you have to like Monastrell with its full-bodied character, but given that, there is hardly a better way to invest 10 euros in red wine.
The best wine in the Juan Gil line is the Silver Label (approx. 14 euros), a slightly longer barrel-aged selection of the Yellow Label, which after twelve months in old barriques does not taste particularly complex but authentically of laurel, blackberry and somehow like ink. Surprisingly, the weakest part of the trio for me is the overwhelmingly jammy Blue Label for around 26 euros, in which Gil uses Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah in addition to Monastrell.
Old New World
Just one look at the figures reveals that the imported varieties do not really belong to Jumilla. 100 percent of the Monastrell vines trained as gobelets can survive without irrigation. 0 percent of the international grape varieties grown as guyot can do so. Irrigation is possible, but expensive. It regularly costs more to irrigate a hectare than to buy a hectare, María Dugnol explains to me, who represents the Gil Family Estates abroad as sales manager. Nevertheless, twenty years ago, many in the region chose Cabernet and other international varieties, which were easier to sell than the neglected Monastrell.
Organic without trouble
Since the region’s reputation has risen, the planting of international grape varieties has declined, also at Juan Gil. The Monastrell vineyards with several meters between the vines do not yield more than 1500 kilograms per hectare. But space does not seem to be the limiting factor anyway, in a region where a winery has been able to expand to several hundred hectares in 20 years.
The Monastrell gobelets are also survival artists in terms of their resilience to fungal diseases. Thanks to the good ventilation and the lack of rainfall during the vegetation period, Juan Gil has been able to practice organic farming for several years without sacrificing anything; the old gobelets do not even need copper. Oidium and peronospora are not a problem, the berries only have to deal with very little botrytis in fall. When I ask María Dugnol about the biggest challenge during the transition, she laughs and says: “The paperwork”. From the 2023 vintage onwards, all Gil wines from Jumilla will be certified; the other bodegas will follow.
Juan Gil El Nido: A misguided focus on Cabernet Sauvignon
The flagship of the Gil Family Estates is the Cabernet Monastrell blend El Nido from the eponymous bodega just a few hundred meters from the main cellar. Everything here screams out for icon wine. A bottle costs just under 150 euros. The Flying Winemaker is called Chris Ringland and lives in Australia. The open maceration tanks were specially shipped from there to Spain because they have exactly the shape that Ringland prefers, as Angel Gil tells me. 80 percent of the wines mature in new French barriques and 20 percent in new American oak barriques that have been aged for 26 months in Australia. The bottles of El Nido are so massive that they have to be labeled by hand, as they do not fit into the machine. The entire bodega only uses the free run obtained at low pressure. The so-called taille, the second press fraction with more tannin and less acidity, is used in the main cellar.
All this makes El Nido a sophisticated wine, dense, concentrated and thick. Although the alcohol content of 15.5 percent does not exactly promise finesse, the wine is well balanced and surprisingly easy to drink. The wood is very loud and obvious, but still gives evidence of very high-quality barriques. Ringland and the Gil family know how to accurately convert the high production costs into aromas.No doubt: El Nido is a perfectly made red wine within its style. Anyone looking for maximum concentration, intensity, wood, alcohol and prunes will find what they are looking for.
For me, however, the greater wine – similar to Silver and Blue Label – is El Nido’s second wine, called Clio. I put this mainly down to the inverted ratio of grape varieties. El Nido consists of 70 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 30 percent Monastrell. In Clio, the 85-year-old Monastrell vines represent 70 percent, which adds an austerity to the warmth and the kitschy wood. It is precisely this austerity that El Nido lacks in order to develop the last bit of complexity. Clio promises lots of concentrated fruit and toast, blueberry pie with dark chocolate, dried apricots, laurel, juniper, black coffee and a wonderful richness, with a texture almost like tar or ink. Without having tasted it all, I assume that Clio is one of the best wines in Jumilla.
Frankly, it doesn’t quite occur to me why Juan Gil has chosen a grape variety that has nothing to do with the region’s DNA for the company’s flagship wine. 85-year-old ungrafted gobelets of autochthonous varieties versus 20-year-old trendy varieties that can hardly get along here in the mountains on their own? Come on…
Moreover, Juan Gil’s hyper-ripe style, which aims for full maturity and concentration, suits Monastrell much better than Cabernet Sauvignon.
“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” says Mariá and shows me a Monastrell grape with small, dark blue berries whose skin is already so wizened that winemakers in Burgundy, Germany or Bordeaux would probably reject them as overripe. But Monastrell seems to be able to handle this. Even though the label of Clio states 15.5 percent alcohol, it doesn’t seem overwhelming to me. Nor do Silver and Yellow Label struggle with alcohol. Corteo – a Syrah from Bodega El Nido – and Blue Label are much heavier at the same levels.
Alcohol levels are currently rising everywhere, not only in Spain. In this scenario Monastrell is turning out to be the grape variety of the future. There is also no need to worry about the ageing potential of Monastrell. Hardly any wine matures better than Bandol, which is made on the French Mediterranean coast from Mourvèdre, as Monastrell is called in France.
Miraculous Monastrell
A look at the science also shows that Monastrell is like no other variety able to allay fears about the future of viticulture in times of climate change. To explain this, I’ll have to go into a little more detail. But it’s worth it.
In the summer – actually for a report on Bordeaux in Meiningers Sommelier – I got to know Marc Plantevin from the Institut des Sciences de la Vigne et du Vin and with him the concept of isohydricity and anisohydricity. Scientists use this concept to describe the strategies of different grape varieties under water scarcity. Isohydric varieties close their stomata very quickly to minimize evaporation, whereas anisohydric varieties close their stomata much later and consume the last available water; they literally hyperventilate and only stop photosynthesizing when everything is used up. The two strategies are a continuum. Varieties such as Touriga Nacional or Xinomavro are very isohydric, while Pinot Noir is very anisohydric. Many varieties lie somewhere in the middle. Marc describes them as “pessimists and optimists”. The one save water and reduce their water consumption, the other consume everything while it is there.
Now back to Monastrell: Monastrell seems to be able to change its strategy from situation to situation like no other grape variety, and neither waste too much water nor save too much. The basically isohydric variety can, in some situations, almost perform like an anisohydric one – a decisive advantage in regions where all the annual rain falls in a few months. This has always been the case in southern Spain, but regions in northern and central Europe are also increasingly becoming winter rainfall regions. Although Marc’s studies are based on small data sets and, as a scientist, he is naturally cautious about making unsubstantiated claims, he nevertheless suspects: “There is evidence to suggest that Mourvèdre has this ability to subsequently change its strategy to be the most balanced as possible between carbon uptake with photosynthesis and avoiding embolism from water stress. And above all, it produces fantastic wine!”
Jumilla as a region of the future?
Perhaps, counterintuitively, the dry, hot regions of southern Europe are the winners of the climate crisis. If we consider drought and the preservation of biodiversity to be the two major agricultural challenges for the upcoming decades, it becomes clear that neither water shortages nor fungal pressure from organic farming will cause Juan Gil serious problems.
In organic viticulture, which does not use chemical pesticides, copper is the only weapon to fight fungal diseases. But copper accumulates in the soil, which is also not a sustainable solution. Alternatives such as Taegro – a sealing fungus that competes with Botrytis and other fungi but does not harm the plant – have so far been significantly more expensive and less effective than copper. Being able to grow grapes almost without copper, as Juan Gil does, is likely to be a future-proof solution.
The second aspect, drought, is only a problem in Jumilla where people have caused it themselves with trendy grape varieties. Nature’s self-regulating power is tremendous and always fascinating. Another counterintuitive lesson of the climate crisis is that sometimes it is the best to simply do nothing and leave the pre-industrial heritage untouched. To put it short: we should be more courageous with Monastrell. Juan Gil provides this courage.
