Wine Shopping in Málaga Part Three – The Ugly
And so to the final part of my “the good, the bad and the ugly” series of wine shopping in Málaga and I can hear the Ennio Morricone music already! In my last post, I made brief reference to Málaga Conarte. The title of this final post is a bit misleading because what I’m going to talk about isn’t ugly at all but is in fact a project which has introduced some very attractive labelling to some of Malaga’s more famous wines.
To explain a little further; Málaga Conarte is a recent project involving 10 wineries from the Málaga region. The project teams up each of the wineries with artists from Málaga who were commissioned to produce a piece of artwork inspired by the wine and which is then also used as the labelling for these limited edition wines.
I won’t rehash the story of my mistake in not purchasing any wines from the Málaga wine museum described in part two, other than to say that by the time I went looking for some of the wines in this series, I was scrambling almost as much as the Sierras de Málaga debacle. I did manage to find one of the sweet wines in the series in another shop and it was the Bodegas Gomara Lacrimae Christi. (You’ll notice the label in the picture below actually spells this Lacrimae Christie for some reason. Both spellings are used widely on the web).
The artwork was painted by Maribel Alonso and depicts a paradise garden with bunches of grapes ripening under the afternoon Málaga sun. The wine is produced by Bodegas Gomara and is made from a blend of 90% Pedro Ximenez and 10% Moscatel Alejandría. I actually brought this wine home to Ireland with me and the last Spanish sweet wine I had tasted prior to this was the superb Ximenez-Spinola Pedro Ximenez, so it was always going to be difficult for this wine to shine in my eyes. I actually quite enjoyed the dried raisin fruit character of the Lacrimae Christi but it just didn’t have any of the silky smoothness that you get with the Ximenez-Spinola Pedro Ximenez, nor should one expect it to, given that it is a fraction of the price. Irrespective of that, I thought this was an interesting project which added an extra dimension to the marketing of these wines. For a full list of the artists and wineries, visit www.vinosconarte.com
