From: Sierra de Malaga, Spain

Varietals: 80% Moscatel de Alejandria, 20% Doradilla

Tasting Notes: Floral jasmine and heady wildflowers, a wine while priming the hedgerows and pesky weeds. Oily and supple, with a touch a bite at the end, lends itself for a midday tipple and cucumber sandwich.

Pairing: Don’t be fooled by the “cucumber sandwich” bit, this wine is extremely versatile with food. You could pair this with Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Indian cuisine with ease. The juxtaposition between varietals normally used for dessert wines being made into a still white wine gives a rich but lively palate that can link different dishes together with an ease not often found in one wine alone. So, for today’s pairing, we’re sharing Kay Chun’s Banh Xeo recipe. It’ll yield 4 servings, and take about an hour to make.

The province of Malaga has been a wine-producing area since the arrival of the Phoenicians almost 3,000 years ago. It was this civilization that began to cultivate the vine, which kept on growing thanks to other cultures such as the Greek, Roman and in times of the Al Andalus. Around the nineteenth century Malaga’s wines were at its greatest: there were about 112,000 hectares of vineyards and the wines were exported halfway around the world from the port of Malaga.

A devastating phylloxera plague destroyed all the vines, but the province has been recovering gradually and today its wines are again one of the most famous and appreciated ones.

Currently there are 3,800 hectares of vineyards in Malaga, where the Muscat and Pedro Ximenez grapes predominate. The diverse topography and different climate zones- ranging from continental in the north, mediterranean at the coast or even subtropical in the Axarquia region- make Malaga wines unique.

Practicing organic

Fermentation with wild yeasts

Minimal sulfites