Pago de los Capellanes Doroteo 2020

Last year we welcomed our first Ribera del Duero to the top 50 … and it was white. This year sweeps us back to the original inspiration for the post-1980 explosion in plantings on Spain’s Duero: deep, dark Tempranillo-based red grown at altitude, and packed with an energy and force which clearly contrasts with the softer, more reposeful pleasures of classical Rioja. This wine is an opaque black-red in the glass, with aromas in which its 27 months in oak can be discerned. For all that, it’s the fruit – sombre, driving, insistent – that’s on the front foot, with just a little tobacco and leather beginning to point the way to bottle-evolution. It’s big in the mouth – but not wide or fat; that altitude brings instead a kind of aerial urgency. The quickening acidity plays as much a structuring role in the wine as does its relatively light, graceful tannins. A long, tenacious finish suggests older-vine fruit.

A very good wine with aromas of black pepper, ripe but fresh blackberries, mussel shells, graphite, roasted spices and cigar box. Pretty full-bodied on the palate, with tight, round, fine-grained tannins. Long and structured. Drink from 2026.