Wine of the week: Sangre de Toro Garnacha 2015

The Sangre de Toro garnacha is a red wine for hot weather, and delivers more than $7 worth of value

One of the cheap wines everyone drank in those long ago days before the blog was the Sangre de Toro Spanish red blend, which came with a little plastic bull. I must have had hundreds of the bulls.

I haven’t seen the red blend in years, though the producer’s website says it’s still around. Instead, what’s showing up on store shelves near me is the Sangre de Toro garnacha ($7, purchased, 13.5%), a red wine made with the garnacha grape. And I was pleasantly surprised by what I tasted:

• Varietally correct, which means soft berry fruit, but not too ripe or jelly-like, a common garnacha problem. There was even a bit of spice and enough freshness to balance the fruit.

• Regionally correct. It tasted like a Spanish wine, and not a wine made in Spain to please the infamous U.S. wine palate. This may have been the most pleasantly surprising part.

• A minimum of post-modern winemaking. Other than a bit of fake oak on the back (the tasting notes call it “licorice”), the wine didn’t taste manipulated or worked over to make it something it wasn’t.

Frankly, I didn’t expect to enjoy the Sangre de Toro garnacha as much as I did. But it was $7 worth of wine, if not more, as well as the the kind of red wine that works perfectly in Dallas when it’s 100 degrees in the middle of July. I chilled it for about 20 minutes in the fridge, and drank it with sloppy Joes and cole slaw. What more could I ask for in the middle of the week?

The only bad news? No plastic bull.