CWD: Pato bubbly

Lee Short

Lee Short
It was rose. The bottle went out with recycling this morning, so memory will have to serve...I think it just said "Luis Pato" and "Baga". Nice stuff; a great deal like drinking a very dry fruity rose with bubbles. Not soft and a little sweet like much rose bubbly is; rather tart. Gotta be zero dosage. Will return for more. $15 plus tax.
 
By an odd quirk of fate (is there another kind?) I tasted another Luis Pato sparkling wine with Luis Pato's daughter in Culver City. IIRC, it was the Espumante Bruto and it was really good. It's made from grapes even more obscure than Baga, varities called Maria Gomes (95%) and Alinto (5%). It was good. Very fizzy, very dry, quite refreshing, and didn't seem to be suffering from any sort of dosage. It received 100 points from the Vinos Unico staff, so it must be good (unlike their website, which seems to be constructed from a blog platform and is all about downloading pdfs. WTF, didn't that shit go out of fashion about the time of Altair?

Luis Pato is the King of Baga, a fact confirmed when I asked Xarax about him the last time he was in town. I liked his reds just fine. Baga tends toward rusticity but the wines age really well.

Also outstanding were the Priorat wines from Joseph Puig of Viedos de Ithica. His Odysseus Pedro Ximenez was bone dry, compelling, and multifaceted while the Odysseus Garnacha Bianca was even more so and as full bodied and complex as any of the red wines in the room except for an Amarone that was just plain big and raisiny (as such wines are wont to be in their youth). Puig's wines merit serious consideration as wines of the year by someone, and probably be worthy of a rating of 102 points from the Vinos Unico staff.

-Eden (the Vinos Unico website could really use some work)
 
We visited the super charming Pato in Bairrada four months ago and wrote about it in the trip report posted here as a jpg (so must be converted to pdf). The white grape Eden mentions is Arinto, and we tasted several sparklers, which sell very well and basically earn Pato the means to make his flagship ungrafted Baga. The daughter is Filipa Pato, a competent winemaker in her own right, somewhat more commercially minded, and more focused on neighboring Do.
 
They had the Espumante Bruto as well, I'll have to give it a spin. I've had a couple of Pato reds before, but never his top of the line wines.
 
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