Viña de Martín Escolma 2015

The current vintage of the top of the range in white is the 2015 Viña de Martín Escolma Blanco. Luis Anxo talks about a very good vintage, and he's always quite prudent and humble, which means the vintage was no less than excellent, with perfect weather that allowed picking each plot of white at the right time and the red ripened properly. Here, he wants to express "our way of understanding wine: ancestral varieties and lands, manual and respectful viticulture, forcing low yields, minimal intervention and a relatively long time in the cellar. We want a complex wine, but direct and intimate." This is a blend of Treixadura Albariño, Lado and Torrontés from his oldest vineyards on poor soils that deliver one kilo per plant. Each plot ferments separately with indigenous yeasts in new or semi-new 300-, 500- or 600-liter oak barrels, where the wine is kept with lees for one year, then blended and bottled. It's kept three years in bottle and sold the November four years after the harvest. This is a quiet and serious wine, like its creator, subtle, elegant and nuanced. It has notes of herbs and spices, pollen and beeswax. This is a super balanced vintage, with ripeness, concentration, freshness and elegance in a rare combination. This feels very young and seems to be evolving at a very slow pace and should make old bones. I've had wines from Luis Anxo close to 30 years old, and they are still going strong, so my drinking window is very conservative. 4,800 bottles and 200 magnums were filled in December 2016.