Finca Sandoval 2023

The flagship red 2023 Finca Sandoval, a selection from their best plots and soils with more limestone, is 90% Syrah from a plot planted in 2011 and 10% Garnacha. It fermented with 50% foot-trodden full clusters and had 15 days of maceration, then it aged in 2,500-liter Austrian foudres. It has textbook descriptors of the variety—when it's good—violets, red cherries, smoky bacon and tar, nuanced and complex. It comes in at 14% alcohol, with a pH of 3.7 and 5.56 grams of acidity with abundant, slightly dusty tannins. It's slightly more southern in this vintage. It was a challenging year, with four or five episodes of hail, the last one in September (!) that decimated the crop. Just 3,300 bottles were produced, which is almost half of the volume of normal years because of the hail. It was bottled in November 2024.