Alfredo Maestro - Almate, Tempranillo, Spain (2022)

TASTING NOTES

Ripe, soft and delicious easy drinking. Rich aromas of ripe black fruit, lavender and toffee with notes of rose. On the palate the wines is savoury with a deep sense of minerality and earth. A superb value.

From varying vine ages located in Valtiendas at 1,000 meters elevation, as well as Peñafiel, at 700 meters. The wine is fermented in steel vat with 15-20 days of maceration and 50% stem inclusion (sometimes up to 100%, depending on vintage), and raised over winter with one racking: unfined, unfiltered, and no added SO2. Aging for only four months in old oak barrels. The wine shows a little reduction upon opening that quickly disappears with some aeration to reveal the warmth and depth of the wine. 

Alfredo's family came to the winemaking town Peñafiel, Ribera del Duero from the Basque Country and started making his own wine in 1998. Alfredo began eliminating  winemaking additives and tricks "to better tell the story of the land" in 2003.

Over the past few years, Alfredo has been seeking out neglected parcels around the Ribera del Duero and the nearby Madrid to make wine from.  He looks for old vines, poor limestone or granitic soils, and the requisite high elevation that gives freshness to wines. He has accumulated 9 hectares and two small bodegas, one located in his native Peñafiel in the Ribera del Duero, where his father helps with the bodega work, and the other in the Navalcarnero area, southwest of Madrid.