Bodegas Exopto Rioja El Espinal 2017
$75.99
6 pack Buy
Out of stock
Description
Bodegas Exopto is one of the new wave of modern winegrowers and quality wine makers in Rioja – Outstanding, well tended, cool vineyards on rocky soils, very old vines and low yields (the total opposite to the trend of mass produced, American oaked wine of the region).
Passionate artisan winemaker, Tom Puyaubert (in fact a Frenchman who married an Espanola!) is fanatical in his focus on their vineyard: 50-100 year old Tempranillo and 70 year old Garnacha vineyard located in Rioja Alavesa (600 metres altitude and the coolest in Rioja). He uses French oak and is producing small quantities of top quality vino (3000 cases – miniscule production for Rioja). No doubt about it Exopto is a Riojan star in the making!
El Espinal is the first label under Tom Puyaubert’s Colección Miguel Angel Mato from the grower of the same name. It is highly likely there will be others. Mato, a native of San Vicente de la Sonsierra, is the seasoned grower who does all of the work, cultivating by mule, in some of Exopto’s principal vineyards. He also owns a number of old vineyards, high on the slopes of the Sierra Cantabria. Under this new project, Puyaubert is planning on making and releasing a series of small-batch wines from Mato’s familial plots with the grower carrying out all the farming duties, and Puyaubert making the key decisions and making the wine. In Tom’s words, “we hope to highlight the unique character and hard work he [Mato] puts into his best plots.”
Here, the ‘pin’ in the plot name Espinal references the pine trees on the exposed slopes of the Sierra Cantabria in San Vincente and reminds us that they have always been a part of this high country landscape. This site–a 0.3-hectare, limestone/clay vineyard–is planted to bush vines of the extremely rare Maturana Tinta vine. Maturana is a re-emerging variety in Rioja that the Wine Grapes bible classifies as Trousseau (although Puyaubert tells us that this is false and that these vines are Castets, a now almost extinct French wine grape variety that was once grown in some quantity in the Bordeaux area and is related to Cabernet Franc). When you taste this wine you feel sure he is correct. The colour alone tells you that it could not be Trousseau and the aromatics took me straight to the Loire. Regardless, this wine is a rare (perhaps even unique) 100% example of this grape. Another atypical facet of this cuvée is Puyaubert’s use of Vinification Intégrale, whereby he places the fruit into closed, 600-litre, French oak barrels where they ferment and are rolled several times a day. No pump overs, no pigéage etc., just rolling. This results in more of an infusion than an extraction. Following fermentation and pressing, the juice is then racked back into these same casks for 15 months before bottling. The result is unlike anything we have tasted from Rioja. Picked a full month after Exopto’s Ábalos vineyards (Castets is very late ripening and the site is over 650 meters), this second release is as enigmatic as the first. The nose is wonderfully perfumed with cool nettle, blackberry and violet while the palate is all crunchy blackcurrant shot through with smoky, ferrous minerals, white pepper and a good twist of that sappy coolness we found on the nose. Like an outstanding Saumur yet with perhaps more flesh, this is a unique and outstanding red from Rioja’s high country.
93 points, Luis Gutiérrez, The Wine Advocate #243 “One of two new single-vineyard reds, the 2017 El Espinal comes from a plot in San Vicente de la Sonsierra at 650 meters in altitude, on sandy soils with clay and limestone surrounded by pine trees. The particularity here is that Maturana Tinta (a.k.a. Castests, a relative of Carmenere) was regrafted on Garnacha some 25 years ago, and this is a varietal Maturana, which is quite rare. It fermented in 225-liter barrels and matured in 600-liter barrels for 15 months. There is more concentration and more of everything, including the peppery and herbal aromas, and a pungent note of freshly cracked back peppercorn on the palate. It’s a more powerful and long-lived year, and it’s impossible to guess as Rioja because the profile is completely Atlantic and would fool almost everybody in a blind tasting. So, it’s not for you if you hate the herbal character of the Bordeaux wines. 1,200 bottles were filled in March 2019.”
RRP $94 Special 6 pack Buy – limited
Additional information
Producer | Bodegas Exopto |
---|---|
Region or Country | Rioja, Spain |
Vintage | 2017 |
Variety | Maturana |
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