Spanish wine has lost buzz in English speaking forums?

I have read a very interesting thread on the Wine Therapy forum about Spanish wines:
http://enemyvessel.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2896&FORUM_ID=4&CAT_ID=1&Topic_Title=TN%3A+Woe+is+the+%2795+Finca+Villacreces+and+a+lament%2E&Forum_Title=We+all+have+issues

I quote some of the more interesting comments on that thread. I think they may open a very interesting discussion here about the evolution and external image of Spanish wine industry.

B. Kane: ";It seems like yesterday that the interent wine community, as well as the wine community as a whole, was all abuzz about Spanish wines. There were a string of much heralded vintages, ’94, ’95, ’96 along with a burst of new wineries that garnered much page space in virtually all of the wine press. (…) Where did that all go?

Here it is, 2004, and I find that despite my best intentions, I really don’t have much of an idea anymore of what’s going on in Spain. The Spanish wine scene has virtually dried up in terms of coverage in the press and wine bulletin boards, El Mundo excepted, though I still can’t read the Spanish ads in the subways.
(…)

Over the past few years I’ve watched with dismay as both the ’94 and ’96 quickly went downhill much sooner than just about everyone that was posting about them on release, expected. Well, tonight, the ’95, too, has joined the ’94 and ’96 in purgatory.";

R. Callahan (Admin): ";Sometimes good (Spanish) wines were permanently unbalanced. Quite often, poor-quality wood permanently ruined potentially outstanding wines. More often, overwooding merely removed a potentially happy youth and left the wines to face adulthood with a structural scar that fades but never, ever disappears. It’s a sad fallacy to believe time heals flaws in wooding any more than it heals other misjudgments in the cellar. Tannins polymerize, and that ameliorates the problem. But it does not correct it.

C. Coad: ";in our little insular NY world there was a lot of buzz about five years back about the exciting stuff that was coming out of mostly unfamiliar regions (unfamiliar to me, anyway). That buzz has faded to almost nothing now; the Spanish wines that crop up around here all seem to be big, woody indistinguishable boutique reds or cheap ";fruity"; quaffers like Castaño’s line, very little of what I would classify as quality stuff at reasonable prices. (Or Tondonia, which has me hypmo-tized as well, but that’s an argument for another day.)

It’s hard to explore the wines of a region if the wines you keep coming across all seem to be cut from similar cloth, not to mention putting a California-sized dent in the wallet. One of the reasons it’s easy to find chenin to swoon over is that you can find dozens to sample in the $10-20 range, even in these weak-dollar days, so experimenting won’t put you in the poorhouse.";

Many interesting comments, isn’t it?

What it’s clear is that most of these guys don’t know Verema.com…