'Matallana' Tinto Fino 2019
$250.00 RRP
This affordable masterpiece is entirely handmade, biologically grown and matured for 18 months in new French barriques. Although beautifully made, with great finesse and integration, it begs for at least 3 years' cellaring to allow regional perfume, earth, and all the many layers of complexity to really express. Matallana is not actually a 'Cru' (single site wine), for in Ribera Telmo and Pablo choose to blend the soils for balance. Powerful iron and stone-dense soils in the south, perfumed chalky-limestone sands in the centre, and rich clays in the north all find resonance in this genuinely great wine. A central 'cup' of soft fragrant tobacco-cherry blue fruits has lift and wander in all directions ... All aspects of Ribera and its family of Tempranillo are present, nothing dominates. A cherry-perfume-earthiron-tannin-mineral masterpiece.
Tobacco and caponta-fleshy vegetal aromas, with rhubarb and sarsaparilla, gentian violet and a dark cherry black-purple-red fruit presence; the palate is long and full with no pronounced fat or round aspects, just a deep, wide, long tube of utterly gentle tannin fullness carrying fine oak and delicately choc-cherry-tobacco fruit going along and on …