August 2024 Inaugural Blanco Y Branco
 |
Pedro Mendez 2022 AlbarinoRegular Price: $32.99
Club Price: $28.04
|
Estate story and image courtesy of “The Source” wine imports.
Since our importer (The Source) has done a masterful job of the background on Pedro, we are sharing their introduction to him and to his wines verbatim, adding comments on the tasting to this wine at the end.
“Michelin-starred restaurants haven’t always been a big deal for Spain (after all, it’s a French concept), but one Catalan trailblazing restaurant that’s now a museum, elBulli, led by the Ferran and Albert Adrià, changed the face of Spain’s global restaurant position and was the first one fully committed dive into molecular gastronomy, worldwide. While Michelin-starred restaurants don’t have much pull in the US over the market’s fine wine interests, they remain the primary measuring stick for Spain’s growers and their achievements. Real estate on lists for these limited-seat restaurants is hard to get (except for wines with built-in investment value), especially with Spain’s embrace of international wines more than most other major European wine-producing countries. To make the cut, you must already have the world’s attention, or you must be doing something unique and at a high level. Pedro Méndez doesn’t yet have the world’s attention, but he’s well represented in Spain’s top culinary destinations, including dozens of Michelin-starred spots throughout the country, including País Vasco’s three-star Arzak, an institution that landed its first star in 1974.
Pedro’s breakthrough into Spain’s top spots started with his reds—50-70-year-old Mencía and Caíño Tinto vines, with the former a peculiar variety for the appellation, especially with its enviable vine age. With just over 1000 bottles produced, half of them are sold to Spanish Michelin-starred restaurants, and most of the rest to top local restaurants. This says something, no?”
Pedro’s Albariño collection is from the Salnés Valley hamlet, Meaño. If I were to draw a comparison to Pedro’s wines and our other growers in Rías Baixas, I’d say they’re more powerful than those of Manuel Moldes and, perhaps of equal power to Xesteiriña, but are more contained and classically styled than the latter. Pedro’s Albariños have broad shoulders, a compact core and megathrust. This may be partly due to the older average vine age of his many parcels, and, in some cases, deeper topsoil. Moldes’ cru Albariños are on schist, with his Afelio on the mostly granite. Xesteiriña harvests from a single plot of extremely hard metamorphic rock with almost no topsoil. The bedrock is somewhere between medium- to high-grade metamorphic rock: some looks like gneiss while others look like schist. Xesteiriña’s rock type is probably the rarest of all in Salnés with vineyards planted.
Image courtesy “The Source” wine imports
The three tree groves sit at 10, 50 and 130 meters altitude in Meaño on granite bedrock and granite sand and gravel on wide, relatively flat terraces. (In these parts, extreme slopes are less important than other viticultural areas with clay or limestone because water passes through granite soils quickly.) And, Meaño has a lot of the earliest part of the day out of the summer sun because it’s tucked down in a little valley with the highest parts on the south and southeast of the vines. It’s also protected in the north from the wind, which gives that extra body pump in an already naturally pumped wine. In the cellar, it’s naturally fermented and aged in old French oak until the next season’s wine is ready to go into the same barrel.
Each of Pedro’s cuvées are staggered releases based on their more optimal drinking window. The eponymous label, “Pedro Mendez,” is the earliest, along with the previous season’s As Abeleiras, and the year before that one, Tresvellas. All three vintages arriving, 2020, 2021, and 2022, are stellar Albariño years, which makes this trio particularly exciting. None of Pedro’s wines conform to the appellation Rías Baixas, therefore none bear the vintage date or grape name (though coded at the bottom as a Lot). These two non-conforming label elements are common in Galicia."
Of these three Pedro Mendes Albariños, our August choice is the 2022 Pedro Mendez “Viño Branco do Val”. We tasted it through various temperature ranges. Too cold, it's a bit closed off, but very focused and crystalline. When at about 65º F, it turns into a lemon-yellow bowl of deliciousness. It’s so delicious on the first take, that it’s hard to want to move on from its magical combination of aromas and mouthfeel. It captures the elegance of sandy granite soils, salty ocean breeze rim, sweet Meyer lemon, sweetened juicy lime, grapefruit peel, even a tinge of bergamot, then honeysuckle, and agave. It tantalizes the mid-palate with a saline breadth that takes over the whole mouth. Oh joy that thou delivers, Pedro. We can't wait to taste your other two creations, and your reds. For now, this shall suffice. It will be a magical pairing with some grilled giant prawns, maybe Spanish style with legs and head and feet. Or with oysters. Or with a grilled swordfish on a bed of fresh pasta. The possibilities with wine this good are endless.
 |
Cume do Avia 2021 Arraino BrancoRegular Price: $32.99
Club Price: $28.04
|
Estate story courtesy of “The Source” wine imports.
It is special to meet importers who thoroughly get to know each of the producers they import. The Source, importer for Cume do Avia, is one such importer, and given that they have travelled to and have met the team behind Cume do Avia, and that we haven’t, we feel it is best to share their first-hand account verbatim, again adding our notes at the end.
“We first met Diego Collarte on an unnamed road outside of Ribadavia, in Spain’s Ribeiro wine country. As Cume do Avia’s ringleader and instigator, he’s the one who claims responsibility for the “completely irrational decision” his clan made fifteen years ago.
Diego and his brother, Álvaro, grew up in Vigo, northwestern Spain’s largest metropolitan and industrial area. The bustle of city life wasn’t in their blood, so in their early twenties they embarked on the courageous restoration of vineyards in an ancient Galician ruin where their ancestors once lived. “I was not interested in material things. I only wanted to be satisfied with what I do,” Diego explained.
Diego (left), Álvaro (center) and their cousins, Fito (right) and Anxo (perhaps hiding somewhere in the vineyards), started their new lifelong adventure together in 2005. As Diego says, “we put our youth into the project,” one that ultimately pushed them to the brink of financial ruin and tested their relationships with each other and many of their loved ones. Three of the four would eventually have to find supplemental work to keep things afloat while waiting for the tide to turn in their favor. Today, their fortune is on the upswing due to a series of wines with the 2017 vintage that began to turn heads, including ours.
In 1942, their grandparents abandoned their land, known as Eida de Mouros, so named after mythological elves who safeguarded local knowledge. Dense with trees and underbrush, the property sits on the top of a hill (a Cume) above the river Avia, and was reestablished in 2005. With no family wealth, they took out loans to buy heavy machinery (which none of them had ever used before) and began to carve out the land. By 2008 they planted their first vines, and in 2012 finally made their first vinification “tests,” as Diego calls them; it was the first time any of them had ever made wine.
They planted thirteen different indigenous Galician varietals selected from ancient vines in the Ribeiro, with plans to plant many more. “The past of these forgotten grapes has been erased, leaving no one to discuss the ideal practices for them. Much knowledge was discarded with the introduction of chemicals to the vineyards after the second World War and there is no manual or record. We are trying to reinvent and rebuild this lost history,” Diego explained.
Their makeshift winery is a five-minute drive down the hill from their vineyards, in their grandparent’s garage. There’s very little room to move in the cramped little space where they tediously vinify and bottle each grape varietal separately to see how their vineyard’s diverse soil types influence smell and taste. With over twenty different lots, most barely enough to fill a barrel, many are aged in restored chestnut with over a hundred years of age.
Aside from the sentimental reasons for seeking their ancestral heritage as the starting point for their dream, there were also technical ones that play to the exceptional quality of their wines: the proximity of the land to the Atlantic; the south and west-facing orientation to maximize the sun’s heat in an otherwise cold region; the richness of the diverse soils, and the constant whistle of fierce winds that bring in fresh air and help grapes to stay dry and pest free. It’s an ideal place within this lush green landscape for their organic and biodynamic practices, extremely difficult tasks in the Ribeiro, a region Diego lovingly refers to as a “paradise for fungus.” (See a 3D map of the vineyard here. The vineyards are only to the left of the main road.)
In a land mostly known for granite, the diversity of soils in their vineyards adds great breadth to their wines, filling the gaps where granite alone can fall short. From one meter to the next, their vineyard soils can quickly change from granite to schist to slate—three of the greatest soil types that exemplify the concept the French refer to as a vin de terroir. The soil grain is equally diverse and randomly shifts back and forth between sand and clay, bringing even more range of palate textures and weight. Some soils are dark orange, white or brown, depending on the mineral makeup. Within only nine hectares (twenty-two acres), it’s an extremely diverse plot of land.”
But in the end, every winemaker's story has to culminate in a wine, and does this one ever! For the Arraiano, Diego blends 53% Treixadura, 17% Albariño, 14%, Loureira 13%, Lado, 3% Caíño Branco into a light, lithe beverage perfect for the fading days of summer. This wine is the deliciously light and natural. Its citrusy first taste full of flinty minerality rests on a bed of wilted white flowers petal aromas. A slight timbre of stemmy pith beautifully supports the mouthfeel, giving this a weight that belies its low 10.6% alcohol. This is a wine that makes you ponder every sip, natural enough for intrigue, but clean enough to beckon the next taste with aromatic bouquet. This wine’s natural fermentation and aging took place entirely in stainless steel bringing a delightful aromaticity to the fore. This wine is delish, and expanded my definition of natural wine and white blends. It has an almost nakedness in its natural simplicity, and drinking feels a bit like skinny dipping in a cool lake in the summer. I’d have this with oysters any day, and if not with oysters, then on a beach in the salty sea air, imagining the shores of the Galician Atlantic. - BMS
Share this
Popular posts
