Mencia from Bierzo, Spain

Purchase Price: $14.97

Wine Enthusiast 93, Wilfred Wong 91, ElsBob 92

ABV 13%

A concentrated dark ruby color. Aromas of black and blue fruit coupled with a hint of spice, sporting a very smooth red fruit taste and a beautiful lasting finish.

An excellent table wine at a fantastic price. Current price ranges from $10-18.

Trivia: Just southwest of Vinos de Arganza lay the largest open-pit gold mine in the Roman Empire. Known as Las Médulas, it was worked by a method called ruina montium: “wrecking of the mountains”, a form of hydraulic mining that would later see service in the gold rush days of California. As Pliny the Elder described in 77 AD, Roman engineers diverted water from the Cantabrian and La Cabrera mountains into vast reservoirs, then released it in violent surges to erode entire hillsides and expose gold-bearing sediment.

Centuries later, the same principle of hydraulic head would be artistically employed for music and water sculpture: the Fountain of the Organ at Tivoli, north of Rome, used gravity-fed water to power its jets and to also force air through the pipes of a Renaissance organ.

Pliny estimated an annual yield of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold (1 Roman pound ≈ 0.72 English pounds). Over the mine’s 250-year lifespan, from the 1st through the 3rd century AD, approximately 58 million ounces of gold were extracted. At today’s prices, that would be worth over $225 billion, a fortune that once flowed through imperial treasuries, legion payrolls, and massive Roman infrastructure projects.