2019 Adegas Gran Vinum Esencia Divina Albarino Rias Baixas Spain 750 ml

In the 1990s, one of Spain’s top sommeliers moved to Washington DC to work at a new restaurant. After a few years, he started up his own importing company, and ever since his top picks first hit US shores, they’ve been claimed straight out of the refrigerated container by DC’s top restaurants—especially ones with a Spanish connection, including those of Chef José Andrés.

These wines have been all but unheard of outside of the Beltway. But a fortuitous visit to the capital put us on their trail, and today we’ve come up big: With the 2019 Adegas Gran Vinum Esencia Diviña Albariño, the crisp and clean superstar white wine of what seems like every Iberia-inflected place in our nation’s capital. It’s a sea-sprayed, tarragon-tinged, mineral-driven white that somms and industry insiders everywhere else would love to get their hands on. 

We fell in love with this Spanish stunner at $14 per glass. Today we’ve got it for just $20 per bottle. John Gilman of View from the Cellar called it “beautifully ripe and precise” in his 91-point review, and considering how this vivacious terroir-driven, saline-streaked Albariño turned out to be the perfect sipper from the first moments of happy hour to the end of the night, we’re betting the cases you claim won’t last too long.

“What, is there some secret Spain-to-DC pipeline we don't know about?” we mused to our friend as we clinked glasses. Then we vowed to do some digging on what seemed to be the sweetheart white of DC’s Spanish restaurant scene. 

We were at Spanish restaurant Taberna del Alabardero, and the Esencia Diviña was the first thing she ordered. On the first sip, we’d recognized the exact same white we’d tasted six hours earlier at Jose Andres’ Georgetown tavern—the wine that had revived us, fresh in from the heat, then brought our Rappahannock oysters to life like a spritz of lemon or dash of crunchy sea salt. 

Our eventual research revealed a decorated Spanish somm whose stateside career had kicked off at Taberna del Alabardero, before he focused on importing wines from his native land. His first shipment of Spanish wines hit US shores in 2002. 

That same year in Galicia, Enrique Peñeiro started Adegas Gran Vinum as a natural continuation of his family’s grape-growing tradition. Using grapes grown on their own eight acres of vineyards overlooking the river Umia and the Ría de Arosa, as well as fruit from 30 neighbor growers, he crafts stunning wines from the granitic sand soils of the region, where the vines are trellised, to keep them off of the damp earth and exposed to the bright sun and sea breezes. 

For Esencia Diviña, the Albariño grapes are hand-harvested before a cool maceration, then a soft pressing, and finally vinification in stainless steel. The result is a pristine taste of Spain’s Galician terroir, the kind that inspires anyone who takes a sip to try and keep as close at hand as possible—like Spain-savvy restaurateurs in the nation’s capital.

We’re sure the chefs are still in good supply, but apologies to our Beltway brethren, who might notice there’s a little less Esencia Diviña to go around this year. As for tapping into the trans-Atlantic Albariño pipeline for home, your only option—if you want this mouthwatering Spanish sweetheart is here and now on Wine Access.