'O Diviso' Single Vineyard Mencía 2018

This old site is 3 hectares north and north-west-facing at 450m altitude. Around a bend in Rio Bibei and thus across a ridge from As Caborcas and Falcoeira, it towers atop a valley on the other side of Santa Cruz. These are 2000 year-old terraces once subject to chemical viticulture, then abandoned. There are some old vines (about 0.5 hectares safe-keeping the genetics of this place), and substantial massale plantings have regenerated the entire vineyard with its own code. Below a ridge line bower of chesnuts ringing with bird-song, the vines grow in electrically perfumed cold air, filled with smells of lavender, mint and fern, chervil, broom and red parsley. ‘O Diviso’ is “the division”, and is the historical place name of this vineyard.

Bitter medicinal herbs (this little terrace is full of them) like the leanest of oldfashioneds, yield to a flush of red flowers, smoked canes and cherry pith fruitfulness nestled in deep-set granite. It’s wild and savoury, redolent with the purity of the mountain air in this remote valley. Steely, linear, sweet-and-sour a wine of very fine line and length and has delicately swishing fruit camisoling around the core.