Airén

Airén is, by area planted, one of the most widely grown wine grapes on earth, and almost nobody has knowingly drunk a bottle of it. It covers vast tracts of La Mancha, the arid plateau south of Madrid, and for most of the twentieth century it was the single most planted variety in the world.

The explanation is drought. La Mancha receives very little rain and has almost no irrigation; Airén survives there because it is exceptionally tolerant of heat and dry soil. Vines are traditionally planted as widely spaced bushes — sometimes only 1,600 per hectare, against ten times that in Bordeaux — because each one needs an enormous catchment of soil to find water. That spacing is why the area figures are so vast relative to the volume produced.

Most of the crop is distilled. Airén is the base for the great majority of Spanish brandy, including Brandy de Jerez, and for industrial alcohol. What is made into wine is generally neutral: pale, light, with faint green apple and citrus, low acidity and a short finish.

Modern winemaking has improved it considerably. Picked early, fermented cool and bottled young, it produces perfectly clean, inexpensive dry white, and a handful of producers working with old bush vines have made genuinely characterful versions with real texture and a nutty, herbal quality.

Plantings have fallen sharply since the 1990s as growers graft over to Tempranillo and international varieties, and Airén has lost its position as the world's most planted grape.