5 Costa Blanca Wines You Need to Try
The Costa Blanca isn't just beaches — it's quietly one of Spain's most interesting wine corners. The local denomination, DO Alicante, stretches from vineyards near the coast up into the hot, dry hills inland, and it makes wines that almost nobody outside the region gets to drink: sun-soaked reds, perfumed whites and one historic rarity that exists nowhere else on earth.
Two grapes do most of the talking here. Monastrell — the flagship red, known as Mourvèdre in France — thrives in the arid inland vineyards. Moscatel de Alejandría, the key white, grows closer to the sea and fills the glass with the smell of orange blossom and grapes at their ripest. Here are five local styles worth hunting down, roughly in the order you might drink them across a long Spanish evening.
1. Dry Moscatel de Alejandría — the aperitif
Most people know Moscatel only as a sweet wine, which is why the dry versions are such a pleasant shock. Fermented fully dry, Moscatel de Alejandría keeps all its perfume — orange blossom, white peach, a whiff of the Mediterranean — but finishes crisp and clean. Around the Marina, where the grape has grown for centuries within sight of the sea, it's the default glass before dinner.
Serve it properly cold with salted almonds or grilled prawns and it makes immediate sense of the landscape: this is exactly what you want to drink on a terrace here at seven in the evening.
2. Rosado — the terrace wine
Alicante's rosados are mostly Monastrell picked early and pressed gently, and they're darker-fruited and more savoury than the pale Provence style — think redcurrant and watermelon with a saline edge. They're built for the local food: rice dishes, anchovies, tomatoes that actually taste of tomato.
Rosado is also, quietly, a great blind-tasting wine: poured into a black glass it confuses almost everyone, which tells you something about how much the colour of a wine steers our judgement. If that idea appeals, our beginner's guide to blind wine tasting shows you how to run the experiment at home.
3. Young Monastrell — sunshine in a glass
Unoaked or lightly oaked Monastrell is the everyday red of the region: deep purple, full of blackberry, fig and sun-baked herbs, with the warmth you'd expect from a grape that ripens in one of the driest corners of Spain. The tannins are present but friendly, and the best examples keep a fresh, almost dusty herbal note — the local scrubland in aromatic form.
It's a forgiving red for beginners because it's so demonstrative: every element you're taught to look for — ripe fruit, body, warmth, grip — is turned up loud enough to spot on the first sip.
4. Aged Monastrell — the serious stuff
Give Monastrell time in barrel and bottle and it turns from friendly to fascinating: the blackberry darkens toward dried fig and cocoa, leather and tobacco creep in, and the texture goes velvety. Old-vine bottlings from the inland valleys can stand next to far more famous Spanish reds — usually at a fraction of the price, because Alicante still flies under the radar.
These are wines for the table rather than the beach: slow-cooked lamb, game, hard sheep's cheeses. Decant the older ones and give them half an hour — they repay the patience.
5. Fondillón — Alicante's historic treasure
And then there's Fondillón, the wine this region is proudest of and the one you genuinely cannot try anywhere else. Made from Monastrell grapes left on the vine until they're overripe, it's often grouped with the world's great fortified wines — though strictly speaking nothing is added: its considerable strength is all natural, and it must age for years in old oak barrels before release. Once famous across the courts of Europe, it nearly vanished in the twentieth century; today a handful of bodegas keep it alive.
In the glass it's amber-mahogany and smells of raisins, toffee, walnuts and orange peel; on the palate it lands somewhere between an amontillado sherry and a tawny port, yet resembles neither. A small glass with dark chocolate, turrón or blue cheese is one of the great endings to a Costa Blanca meal.
Taste them side by side
Reading about these wines is one thing; lining them up and tasting the differences is another entirely. The best way to get to know them is side by side, with someone who knows the stories behind each glass — which is exactly the thinking behind our blind tasting at Katavi wine shop in l'Alfàs del Pi, where local bottles regularly make an appearance with their labels hidden.
If your next trip brings you anywhere near Albir, Altea or l'Alfàs del Pi, reserve a place at the Katavi blind tasting and let the region introduce itself one glass at a time. Fair warning: suitcases have a way of leaving heavier.