Éric Texier’s Chat Fou (‘Crazy Cat’) is a long time favourite. (Here is the 14 vintage, and here is another wine-of-the-week entry by Mr. Texier.)
Texier has a natural approach, and his wines are always clean and pure expressions of grapes and terroirs.
This vintage was tasted at London’s RAW fair in March 2018. It’s made from a typical Rhône blend, mainly grenache, but with some 10-15% of white grapes, that add to the elegance. Destemmed, spontaneously fermented in steel, matured in used barrel for 10 months. No sulphites added.
Éric and Laurence Texier at the RAW fair last year
Chat Fou 2016(É. Texier)
Dark cherry red. Aromas of red fruits, raspberry, cherry, chalk, and slightly spicy. Juicy, luscious on the palate, with a touch of fine tannins, just enough acidity, and in fact quite long.
Alfredo Maestro puts out one delicious natural wine after another. (Read about a visit to his Peñafiel winery here.) This week’s pick is his skin-contact albillo, here in the 2016 vintage.
The wine stayed 6 days with skin-contact, then on lees for 4 months.
The white Lovamor 2016 is a high altitude albillo real (770-1.000m) from more 100-120 year old vines in Olmos de Peñafiel with one week skin-contact, and due to the cold Castilian winter it didn’t undergo malolactic fermentation.
Alfredo refuses to use any DO, so his wines are labelled VT Castilla y León, whether they originate from the Ribera del Duero/ Valtiendas area, Gredos, or occasionally Cigales or other places.
Lovamor 2016(Alfredo Maestro)
Gold to orange colour. Apple and melon in the aroma, flowery, and also lovely, light citrus. Quite rich and complex in the mouth, slightly pétillant, and a lovely, lively citrusy acidity.
Château de Béru is located in the small village Béru, to the east of Chablis town. It has been a property of the family of the same name since the 15th century. Athénaïs de Béru has been in charge since 2004, and now cultivates 15 hectares according to biodynamic principles.
Montserre is made from a single vineyard on the flatlands of the valley, where the soils contain mainly limestone with fragments of rock.
This wine was spontaneously fermented, then spent 3 months in steel and 3 months in old oak vats. There was no fining nor filtering, and no sulphur was added.
Montserre 2015(Château de Béru)
Dark yellow, orange tones. Developed aromas of mature yellow fruits (mandarins, yellow tomatoes, mango), and a slightly bitter peel tone. Round and tasteful, quite powerful, and with a balancing acidity. A cool wine from a warm Chablis vintage.
Price: Medium
Food: A variety of fish (both red and white) and seafood, salads, tasteful cheeses, try with lightly spiced food too
Fanny Sabre was thrown into the vineyard, so to speak. Studying law at the university, her father suddenly died, and she took over the estate. Soon she discovered she actually liked the work. In the beginning she got help from Philippe Pacalet, natural wine guru in the area. It was adieu to conventional farming for good, and soon Fanny was ready to walk the path alone, carrying out most of the tasks herself.
Once here stood a local fort, and you see that here is too much history to dive into in a short note like this. So we come back to it in a later post.
Manual ploughing is employed, and no herbicides are used. Red wines, like this one, undergo whole-bunch maceration in concrete vats. Indigenous yeasts work, before the wines are aged for at least a year, without racking or fining and with only one very light stirring. Then they are transferred to stainless steel vats for three to four months, and lightly filtrated.
Monthélie 2016(Fanny Sabre)
Light, brilliant red. Floral nose, with red berries (raspberry, strawberry), dark cherry and a dark minerality. Quite juicy in the mouth, yet concentrated, with supple berry notes, young and firm tannins, and a fresh acidity.
Valdibella is a small cooperative in Camporeale, in the Palermo province of Sicilia. Their cultivation is carried out in respect of nature, and they value native grape varieties.
This delicious DOC Sicilia wine from the nerello mascalese is made in stainless steel. It’s spontaneously fermented and has a low sulphite content (between 45-50 mg).
Àgape 2015(Valdibella)
Cherry red. Fruit-driven, red berries, lightly spicy, herbs. Light tannin, fresh acidity, mineral finish.
Miguel Valdespino gave me this wine. He became the last Valdespino in the centuries-old company. His two children did not want a career in wine, so he chose -quite surprisingly for me and to many others who followed sherry closely at the time- to sell to José Estévez.
Surprisingly, because Estévez had been more known as a business man than a sherry ‘aficionado’, and furthermore he was involved in the infamous RUMASA fraud.
Valdespino is for me the ultimate sherry producer from the old times. They had unbelievable stocks of treasures in their cellars. And a moscatel from three casks was released a few years ago to a 100 points ovation from American media. But Valdespino was also forward-thinking, and the first producer to mention the vineyard and the ‘pago’ (denotes a larger area) on a label, the fino Inocente from the vineyard of the same name in pago Macharnudo Alto.
Some fifteen years after the first removal of the cork the bottle looked like this
I know this is personal, but never mind: I had visited Miguel Valdespino several times as a journalist and lover of great sherry, and he gave me this bottle some 20-25 years ago. I don’t know all the details. But he told that it had participated in the Paris 1889 world exhibition (the one that celebrated 100 years since the revolution), “then as an old wine”, to quote the master. At the time I got it the wine was bottled from a big barrel, a ‘tonel’ with the letters ‘NO’, denoting that it must not be touched. It was clearly not meant for sale, and Miguel put on a provisional label with the company name, and with a name Pedro Ximénez Tonel written by a typewriter of that time. At that particular time I was visiting with my now former wife. When we parted around 15 years ago we talked about sharing this wine, so I pulled the cork. Suddenly I (as I would say) came to my senses thinking ‘this is wrong’. So I pushed the cork back into the bottle. And I admit that until today I have been unsure what happened to the wine when it was exposed to air some 15 years ago.
What do we know for sure about the wine then? It’s made from the pedro ximénez grape variety. It participated at in Paris 1889. Before that it might have been born in a solera, but I’m not completely sure. Valdespino was a leading company at that time too, so it’s very unlikely that the wine was less than 30 years old, I would say probably a lot more. I think it must have been born some time between 1820 and 1850.
All right, this wine does not exist commercially, and it probably never did. But I call it:
Pedro Ximénez Tonel(A.R. Valdespino)
Unctous, thickly flowing wine, motor oil consistency, with dense curtains (‘cortinas’ in Spanish), dark raisiny brown/mahogany with evident green notes (like all very old px sherries).
Aroma of toasted hazelnuts, nutmeg, prunes, figs, coffee and dark chocolate, but also flowers and more delicate fruits (in direction of yellow tomatoes, plums, mango).
Very sweet and concentrated, but somehow also fresh with an rich resonance and great length.
In my opinion it’s unfair and devaluating to a wine like this to reduce it to points and punctuations, figures and numbers. A Portuguese writer once likened a wine to a cathedral. In the same tradition we could say that this wine evokes images from the ancient times and the soldier that the pedro ximénez grape took its name from. And it’s easy to imagine the ‘alcázares’ and the basílica churches of Jerez de la Frontera, and the sun rising over the ancient Valdespino bodega in that narrow street of the old gypsy quarter of Santiago, right in the heart of town.
Price: Priceless
Food: A variety of desserts, such as cakes and cookies, puddings, nuts, cheeses, and even a small sip is something of a meal in itself
Mazuelo is the local name for cariñena. And I have a feeling when I talk to vintners that it is a grape on the way up. I don’t have scientific proof that it is a fact, but during my trips to Rioja this year I have myself seen more varietal mazuelos than ever before.
A good example I found in the Irégua valley on Ebro’s right bank when I visited producer Gregorio Martínez and winemaker Ricardo Cantera.
The grape has a thick skin and will often be vinified to a dark colour. Here it’s lighter, due to a very light maceration and the coolness of the place (the La Dehesilla parcel, north-facing at 700 meters).
Ricardo Cantera
The grapes were destemmed, the juice cold-macerated in steel for one week at 8°C, fermented with indigenous yeast at up to 16°C. We also ought to mention the partial malolactic fermentation in tank and oak. Total time in used French oak was 8 months.
Finca Mazuelo 2014 (Gregorio Martínez)
Cherry red, a touch of development towards rim. Cherry, plums, herbs. Full on the palate, hint of vanilla, good acidity.
A few weeks ago I wrote and introduction to the wineries of Soria. Read it here, including a note on one of today’s wines. I will now follow up with two winery profiles.
Dominio de Atauta is undoubtedly the leading quality producer in the Soria part of Ribera del Duero. I visited them again in April this year, and met Jaime Suárez. He is in theory the winemaker, while brother Ismael is viticulturalist. But as he say, they work together and consult each other, to have a greater understanding of the totality. The Suárez brothers and their team draw from the valley’s five hundred years of experience in bringing the best out of the tinto fino (tempranillo) grape. Here are extreme conditions with little rainfall, the wind that blows though the vineyards and large temperature variations. Therefore the winemaking it quite easy, there is no great chance of diseases, so the traditional, sustainable way is good enough. All work is manual. The soil treatment is completely natural, with only animal and plant compost. According to tradition there is only goblet-training in the vineyard.
Soil types (Credit: D. Atauta/ Avante Selecta)
In the cellar there is not much intervention needed either. The vats are of various sizes and from different materials, such as wood, concrete and stainless steel.
Big oak vats in the cellar
Today they also count on the Atalayas de Golbán range. While Atauta is typical of Soria, the Atalayas represent the whole of Ribera del Duero. The distribution is roughly 50% of grapes from Soria, the rest is mostly from the Burgos province. This lets them offer more “typical” Riberas within the styles of joven, crianza, and reserva, that many people are more used to.
A winery neighbourhood, “barrio de bodegas”, beside one of the vineyards. These are underground cellars from the 18th century
The Atauta Valley runs 4 kilometres east-west, and 1 north-south. Here they have identified 25 different terroirs. Jaime points to the bottom of the nearest hill where there are 2 meters of topsoil, and smaller, calcareous rocks. 22 hectares are their own, and they control another 23. This makes a total of 600 plots, all of them really small. Only one of these plots is grafted, the rest is pre-phylloxera.
What is different with Soria then? It’s cooler, in general higher altitude, so the resulting wines have less body and tannin structure, but more acidity and freshness. In Jaime’s opinion this is about it, because the soils vary as much here as they do in the rest of the denomination.
Jaime in the highest vineyard
Atauta’s highest plot is at 990 meters. Here there is 2 meters of clay soil, that gives some structure, but the maturity is low and the acidity high. In contrast sandy soils give higher alcohol and richer wines.
A wine soon to be launched is called La Roza, and will from the 2013 vintage on be sourced from here. That is, from the right part. Note that to the left is another owner, that uses chemicals, hence the light colour, and the “dead” soil
They make three “single terroir” wines. -We can’t say single vineyard, Jaime points out, as there is only made 450-1.200 bottles of each of them. La Mala from calcareous soil (a layer of only 60 cm), just 0,7 of a hectare in total. Still there are 10 plots. From these they first make four wines, age them separately, then taste to find the Mala to be bottled. Then it goes to barrel ageing for 18 months. It takes it name (La Mala = the bad one), because of the extremely low yield that this thin layer gives it was earlier considered unprofitable. Valdegatiles in contrast, has the deepest soil (1.6 metres up to the calcareous rock, and the highest content of clay of all their vineyards. It’s thus a powerful wine, but also with the freshness and the minerality of the area. Llanos del Almendro is made with grapes from sandy soil with cobbles stones on the surface. The temperatures here are higher, because of the cobbles.
-We destem all of it, no pressing, first cool maceration (less than 10 degrees), work them twice a day, pumpover and plunging, then raise the temperature.
A word on fermentations, that are almost always “spontaneous”, but only almost always: -If we can fill a tank from one terroir, we use only natural yeast. If we need to add grapes we use selected yeast. Why? Because we want to control the fermentation. With this operation we don’t want to change anything, we are just interested in completing the fermentation.
The only oak employed is of French origin. -For Parada 40% new, then 3rd and 4th use, for 14 months. For the other wines there are different variations according to what we want to achieve, says Jaime.
A short tasting started with one Atalayas wine, the rest were from the Atauta valley.
La Celestina 2015 Crianza(Atalayas de Golbán) sells for less than 10€ in the shop. The grapes are sourced 60% from Soria, the rest from La Horra, near Roa (Burgos) in central Ribera del Duero. 20-25% is new oak.
Cherry red. Full of fruit; red fruits (from the Soria part), blackberry (from Burgos), a touch of lickorice and pepper. It’s full and smooth on the palate, with integrated wood, the Burgos grapes also give some structure.
Parada de Atauta 2014 is fairly new in the assortment. 50-70.000 bottles were made. It retails for around 18€, and it’s by no means an ordinary entry-level wine. It’s made from minimum 80 year old vines, from sandy/stony soil, in and around Atauta.
Dark purple. Fresh, floral aroma with blueberry and blackberry. Smooth tannins, a cool acidity, and a dark minerality.
Dominio de Atauta 2014 is a tremendous wine from 120-160 year old vines, only pre-phylloxera. This is the final blend of the 25 terroirs, so this is probably Atauta’s most complex wine).
Cherry red (lighter in colour than Parada). Floral aroma, raspberry and blackberry, aromatic herbs, some oak in the back. Good structure with mature tannins, minerals (chalk), a touch of coffee. It’s very long, and you feel the flavours come back in waves.
Valdegatiles 2012 (1,2 ha. 100% clay, fermented in steel with natural yeast): Cherry red, not very developed. Lots of fruit, red and black, tobacco and oak is just a sense or feeling in the background. Powerful structure, intense, and a long, fruity aftertaste.
Angela and Werner Michlit’s Meinklang farm is mentioned several times on this site. Look here for a short presentation. (By the way, the grüner wine mentioned in the post is now renamed Heideboden.)
Here we shall talk about another of their many good and economic wines, a delicious red wine from their home ground in Burgenland, near the Hungarian border. It’s based on the zweigelt variety (60%), complemented with blaufränkish (30%) and st. laurent (10%).
Zweigelt normally makes ligh, juicy wines, blaufränkish contributes with fruit, tannin and sometimes a spicy character, whereas st. laurent’s most important feature is colour.
The grapes were biodynamically farmed, the wine spontaneously fermented and raised in tank. The alcohol clocks in at a fairly low 12%.
A Christmas edition of the wine
Burgenland Red 2017 (Meinklang)
Deep cherry red. Young, fresh aromas of raspberries, plums, flowers and herbs. Vibrant and luscious in the mouth with lots of pure fruit, light tannin and a refreshing acidity.
Price: Low
Food: Meats on the lighter side, salads, pizza, pasta, but also fish like bacalao
Domaine Frick is an Alsace favourite, for their honest work, sustainable practises and the delicious fruit and the vineyard expression in their wines.
Here is a recent post where you can read a little about the background
This particular wine comes from a vineyard in Pfaffenheim on fossil ground with limestone and some red clay and gravel. It was planted in the 1970’s and 80’s. The grapes were harvested and selected by hand, spontaneously fermented and was subject to a week of skin-maceration. It was matured in big, old vats of French oak. No filtering nor fining. Biodynamic certified by Demeter, an organization that Frick in fact has done a lot to develop.
Vorbourg Alsace Grand Cru 2016 – pinot gris macération sans soufre ajouté(Dom. Pierre Frick)
Amber with red tones. Aromas of raspberry, yellow apples, fennel. Full on the palate, a light tannic grip, integrated acidity, and a salty finish. Vivid, energetic, and 15% alcohol is no problem. Needs air, and “grows” in the glass.
Price: Medium
Food: Light meat, such as poultry and pig, white and grilled fish, red fish, shellfish (stronger types such as crab), salads, fresh and mature cheeses. Very versatile, in other words
