La Mimbrera 2015

One of two new single-vineyard bottlings and radically different, the 2015 La Mimbrera is a more traditional blend of Tempranillo with 25% Garnacha and 5% white Viura. It comes from a plot in the village of Ábalos, the first vineyard Puyabert bought; the plot has a high percentage of active limestone (17%) in a Mediterranean environment of underbrush, rosemary and thyme, and it's the only plot that wasn't affected by frost in 2017. The wine fermented in 225-liter oak barrels with indigenous yeasts and matured in used French barriques for 18 months. This is the only vineyard from Exopto that didn't suffer the 2017 frost, as it's a warm place on gravel and clay soils with very good insolation, a half-hectare plot that had been abandoned and only both ends of the vineyard had survived. He planted Graciano in the rest but kept these old vines (80 to 110 years of age) and produced only one barrique of this wine in 2014; by working the vineyard and soils to recover it, he then made two barrels in 2016. The wine took some time to take off in the glass, but it finally unfurled beautiful aromas of violets and sour cherries; with a little more time, it developed aromas of a great red Burgundy. The end of the mouth shows the limestone with its chalky sensations. This is superb—in fact, it's very Burgundian overall. Unfortunately, only 300 bottles were filled in April 2017.