Airén

Airén covers more ground than almost any other white grape on earth, and hardly anyone orders it by name. Nearly all of it sits on the dry plateau of La Mancha, south of Madrid, where summers are fierce and rain is scarce. The vines are trained low as free standing bushes and planted very far apart, because each one needs the water under a wide patch of ground to survive the summer. That spacing is why the planted area is enormous while the crop from it is not.

For most of the twentieth century the crop went to the still rather than the bottle. Airén is the base of Brandy de Jerez, and distilling rewards a neutral, high yielding white with no strong character of its own. Wine made from it in that era was oxidised and heavy, because the fruit arrived warm and the cellars had no cooling.

Cool fermentation changed the grape's reputation, if not its fame. Picked early and pressed gently, Airén gives a pale, quiet, low acid white that tastes of green apple and banana skin and costs very little. It will never be profound. It is honest, and it is the reason Spain can put a drinkable white on a supermarket shelf at a price no other country can match.