“Complexity and elegance”70% Tempranillo, 15% Graciano, 10% Garnacha y 5% Mazuelo.
15.000 bottles.
Manual grape harvest of each grape variety in small, ten kilogram tubs. Cooling in cold room until the temperature of the grapes goes down to 3 °C. Double selection of clusters and grains, with mild destemming and crushing. Separate vinification of each variety. Gravity-fed into French oak vats with no pumping. Each grape variety is cold macerated and fermented individually with native yeast strains: 22 days for Tempranillo, 21 for Graciano, 23 for Garnacha and 22 for Mazuelo. Gravity racked to new and second-year French oak barrels before malolactic fermentation.
16-month stay in barrels from different cooperages, with different toasting levels and origins, without racking. Each of the four wines remains over lees until bottled, with periodic bâtonnages during the first months. The wines are racked and bottled without filtering or fining, so a small amount of natural precipitate may appear over time.
Our bottle is inspired in an original eighteenth-century bottle that is on exhibit at the Vivanco Museum of the Culture of Wine.
Very intense garnet-cherry red. Powerful, complex aroma, with abundant ripe red and dark fruit, and well-integrated find wood. There are also elegant mineral notes, spices, toffee and liquorice. Very expressive in the mouth, with a silky, fresh, tasty, intense mouthfeel, leaving a long aftertaste, complex and elegant.
All kinds of char-grilled red meat, foie gras, casseroles and game dishes.
The 2017 vintage will go down in history because of one of the most severe frosts ever seen in Rioja Alta; which, in turn, affected our “Finca El Cantillo” vineyard. It was a luminous dawn on April 28th, when the electric green color of the vines turned to a withering black, forecasting disaster: the frost devastated 80% of the vineyards in the Rioja Alta subregion. A warm and dry winter had hastened flowering and veraison by two weeks, and it all came crashing down. This frost on April 28th would define the harvest. Thankfully, the rains that followed during May and June helped the vines resprout. 2017 was the first year “Finca El Cantillo” was farmed organically, using treatments free of chemical herbicides or pesticides. It was an early and scarce harvest; never before had we started picking at the end of September, with the 11,9 Hectares (30 acres) under vine producing a mere 7,000 bottles.
We will send you our Newsletter monthly in which we will inform you about wine tips, news of the Culture of Wine and special offers.
