Venus de Cartoixá 2021

The Venus range is always sold later, so what we tasted this time were the 2021s, an unusual year, a year marked by 60 centimeters of snow in January and lots of water during the season, with a cooler summer, a very different year. The wines have freshness and acidity. The 2021 Venus de Cartoixà was produced with Xarel.lo grapes locally known as Cartoixà from one hectare of old vines in the zone of Falset. The wines don't have the concentration from previous years, and Sara Pérez feels they need more time to express the inner energy they have, the different balance between alcohol and acidity. It was a year of moderate alcohol (13% here), which they didn't achieve again until 2024. This wine has a complex nose, faintly reductive (a constant in the 2021s) with subtle aromas of dry yellow flowers and pollen, with a reminiscence of soy sauce that gives it a savory profile and made me think of umami, something like chicken broth, with a delicate palate and a fragile, beautiful mouthfeel. They see this as a vin de garde. And I think it can age. This fermented and matured in 600-liter barrels for some 15 months, and the bottles were kept for two years.