'Gaba do Xil' Mencía 2020

This wine is close to definitive of Mencia’s best attributes. Valdeorras is possibly the perfect natural place for Mencia – enough solar energy to ripen tannin, but cool enough to preserve its scant natural acid reserves, with line, crunch and nerve from the granite. Gaba Mencia is unwooded and barely handled, with a great harmony of fruit, earth and the countryside.

Gaba is a wine of soft red fruit alive with granite and herbs, arranged around gentle fruit
tannin and a herb-acid tang. The nose is roasted meat, rhurbarb, fennel, white
strawberry, thyme; shining red fruit in a pastoral setting, aromatic bitters, a touch of
brush. Sweet and sour agrodulce bifolds off a fleshily vegetal palate, nicely rounded in the
middle, gently radiating down and out to all parts of the mouth.