CWD: '04 Finca Sandoval

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drssouth

Stephen South
2004 Finca Sandoval, Manchuela, alc 14%..(83% Syrah, 9% Monastrell, and 8% Bobal)...the nose is very expressive with expresso notes...the palate is very rich and also expressive with black fruits and great integration...just a hint of fruit sweetness but not cloying or overdone...the tannins have receded somewhat (compared with a tasting in 2008)...this is so smooth, balanced and enjoyable!!!....tremendous upside potential for at least a decade...WOW!!

I was only a minor fan of this wine a couple of years ago but it has turned into a very amazingly enjoyable bottle!
 
Do you know Whew Golly? I first met him at a second-hand shop in Trenton. We were both admiring a rather festive piece of Spanish porcelain when he turned to me and said...
 
Aside from wanting to know more about Whew Golly, I'd love to hear about the vineyards and winemaking that went into this wine. Sounds tasty.
 
Many thanks for the certainly excessive praise, much appreciated anyhow.

I never give opinions in writing about my own wines, because I think it creates a conflict of interest with my day job. But I'm glad to give information on our procedures.

In great vintages (and 2004 and 2005 were great in many parts of Spain, including Manchuela), the wines in our area gain a bit too much of everything in structure, dry extract, tannins, concentration, and they need quite a bit of bottle age to be drinkable. I think 2004 is getting there, 2005 not yet.

Not much to say viticulturally or winemaking-wise that's very original. Young (1998) syrah vines, cordon-trained, quite old (1939 and 1945) bobal and monastrell vineyards, head-pruned. Clay-limestone soils, alt. between 2,520 and 2,850 feet. Only bio treatments are used, no herbicides. Yields 28 hl/ha for syrah, 14-15 hl/ha for bobal and monastrell. Hand harvesting (harvesting date from Sep. 12 for the start of syrah to Oct. 15 for the end of monastrell).

Grapes are cooled down to about 12C for a night in an air-conditioned room at the winery before being almost 100% de-stemmed, but not crushed, right underneath the fermenting vats (we put wheels under a small de-stemmer crusher), then dropped into a conveyor belt where a mini-grape selection is quickly done by two persons as the grapes go up and are dropped into small (50 hl) open vats, made of thick fiberglass: we don't pump grapes. We do some cold soak with hand pigeage as long as long as we can keep the grapes cool, then fermentation starts on its own and we just keep its temperature down (never more than 26-28C) to try and keep the fermentation slow and gentle. Preserving some aroma and freshness in these hot places is a big concern. We mostly work with a manual 'pige' and some remontage.

When finished, all the wine goes directly into 225 and 300 l barrels, undergoes malolactic (sometimes takes many months, particularly with grenache) in barrel, is racked and stays in barrel some 10-11 months (with one or two rackings if it gets excessively reduced; we are not as courageous as ric Texier, who ages his wines with protracted reduced and oxidized states). We bottle immediately before the next harvest, in August.

The 2009s are around the corner...
 
Great info, Victor, thanks. What do the small percentages of monastrell and bobal add to the wine, and do the percentages change?
 
Well, we have this belief that truly personal, original, 100% varietal wines can only be made (with a few great exceptions - cf. Chteau Rayas) in cool, climate-limit regions: pinot in Burgundy, riesling on the Mosel... So in our hot part of the world, where so many varieties ripen properly, we are big fans of blends, which are traditional anyhow since, until 50 years ago or so, every vineyard was a mix (what Paul Draper calls a 'field blend').

So while we think that syrah is the only truly interesting French grape for the high plateaus of the southern half of Spain - because it adapts well to the terroir and has some more potential for refinement than local grapes - we don't want to make "a syrah", and the black fruit, earthiness and some rusticity that monastrell and bobal bring give a wine a stronger local personality. I have no idea if we succeed.

We started out with syrah-monastrell only in 2001, we added bobal in 2003, and after 2005 the syrah content has dropped into the 70-80% range... because we have more bobal and monastrell vineyards now, and we don't make this wine according to a recipe, but we go along with what's best every year.

We make four more reds (and one red sweet wine), two of which are formally varietals... but of course, even those are not truly pure varietals: Signo Bobal is 90% bobal, 10% syrah, and Signo Garnacha is 90% grenache, 10% alicante bouschet. Just a wink to show that we carry through with our beliefs, mistaken though they may be. :-)
 
Thanks, Victor, fascinating to get the reasoning behind the blends and their heritage involving the old vineyards. In Portugal, presumably because it is somewhat more backward, they are still conducting lots of DNA analysis because they don't know the true composition of many older vineyards (e.g., Quinta do Crasto's Vinha da Ponte and Maria Teresa).
 
No one knows the exact composition of ANY old vineyard in the Douro, I think. I've walked them with Dirk Niepoort, and there were always some vines even he didn't know what they were...

Our old bobal and monastrell vineyards are just 'mostly' bobal and monastrell. Two of them have a sizable component of a local white grape, verdal. We always use 5 to 10% of those grapes, as the locals always have, in every batch, and co-ferment it with the red grapes, as everyone has always done in Rioja, Cte Rtie or Chanti. (Australian studies indicate that co-fermenting some white grapes is not just a tradition, because they help fix the anthocyanins and aromas better than if you had fermented the red grapes alone!) Our oldest (1942) grenache vineyard also has some nice bobal vines, and we have about 5% bobal in every batch of grenache. That never hurt anybody...
 
I'm curious about how Spain's monastrell differs from mourvedre, as well as completely curious about bobal...a grape I know absolutely zero about. Monastrell seems considerably less tannic than french Mourvedre (for starters), but my sampling numbers are low.
 
Genetically, monastrell and mourvdre are 100% identical. Bandol mourvdre clones have markedly lower anthocyanin contents than southwestern Spanish ones - but that's considered to be a result of a protracted adaptation to a different, more humid and less hot terroir. Monastrell is very tannic, but its denser fruit envelops those tannins more effectively and they show less. There's not so much earthy funkiness in monastrell as in mourvdre - but I think that's also a marked terroir effect, and that monastrell planted in Bandol will be funky and mourvdre planted in Jumilla will not.

The University of Murcia conducted an interesting study with a large variety of French and Spanish clones a few years back.
 
originally posted by VS:
Genetically, monastrell and mourvdre are 100% identical. Bandol mourvdre clones have markedly lower anthocyanin contents than southwestern Spanish ones - but that's considered to be a result of a protracted adaptation to a different, more humid and less hot terroir. Monastrell is very tannic, but its denser fruit envelops those tannins more effectively and they show less. There's not so much earthy funkiness in monastrell as in mourvdre - but I think that's also a marked terroir effect, and that monastrell planted in Bandol will be funky and mourvdre planted in Jumilla will not.

The University of Murcia conducted an interesting study with a large variety of French and Spanish clones a few years back.
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If the grape has adapted to have a lower content of anthocyanin (whatever that means), then unless environmental factors can directly affect that content (in the way that diet affects growth without any input from genetic variation), the grapes can't be genetically identical. And I say this without even knowing what anthocyanin is.
 
Ok, so let's call them 99% identical....or whatever works. I'm glad to just hear someone talk about the differences we all can empirically experience.

Fascinating that when I first heard of mourvedre, it was RP talking about an Auz wine taming a beast of a grape that normally tasted like wet fur, tree bark and god knows what (for that matter, it would be interesting to compare an Auz mourvedre with a Spanish monastrell)...but as you say, Victor, the french versions do seem to show more beastliness than either Spanish or Auz versions. Interesting that you are saying the fruit in the Spanish grape envelopes the tannins such that they are less noticeable.

How about bobal? What is it by itself and what is the value of using it as a blending grape?
 
Not being a geneticist, I can only tell you what I have read as explained by Dr. Carole Meredith: that the DNA profiles are identical. As indeed they are identical between pinot noir, pinot blanc and pinot gris, or between grenache noir, grenache blanc and grenache gris. The level of anthocyanins (i.e., color) apparently is not reflected in the DNA.

There are three dominant red grape varieties in Eastern Spain: north to south, garnacha, bobal and monastrell. Curiously, there's now more acreage of bobal than of either of the other two, but garnacha and monastrell have an international reputation and bobal does not. There's just a little of it in Sardinia; in Spain, three adjoining appellations have almost all of the near 100,000 hectares of it.

Relatively hardy, very uneven in size of berries and bunches (even within the same vine!), very uneven ripeness, very tannic, good dark fruits, always a little more freshness than either grenache or mourvdre, bobal has no genetic kinship to either. Always a little rustic, it doesn't quite make the mark as one of those "great, noble grape varieties", but under the right circumstances it can produce interesting wine. A few of us are now trying to bring it to the attention of wine lovers in and out of Spain. We'll see.
 
originally posted by Yule Kim:
I'm assuming Victor meant that Monastrell and Mourvedre are genetically the same species.
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I'm guessing that this is what he and his source mean too. But I'm a biochemical ignoramus and it might be that anthocyanin does respond directly to environmental input, in which case the genetic identity would be higher. It can't of course be complete or there would be no genetic variation between grapes, a recipe for disaster for the species in question.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Yule Kim:
I'm assuming Victor meant that Monastrell and Mourvedre are genetically the same species.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that this is what he and his source mean to. But I'm a biochemical ignoramus and it might be that anthocyanin does respond directly to environmental input
Click to expand...
Totally possible. You probably have more pigment now than you did before your environmental translocation to the south of France.

It can't of course be complete or there would be no genetic variation between grapes, a recipe for disaster for the species in question.
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Yes, absolute "identity" would require the full sequence (and that's without talking epigenetics at all), which is probably a stronger claim than Dr. Meredith would make.
 
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
You're referring to a 100% bobal or at least bobal dominant wine, Victor?
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Both. As I've explained, we don't make any 100% varietal wines. In addition to our Finca Sandoval Signo Bobal, Juan Antonio Ponce's wines in Manchuela and Mustiguillo's wines in Utiel are good examples of bobal - done in pretty different styles, BTW. Both have US importers. Also, dry bobal ross are fresh and inexpensive (from the younger, higher-yielding vineyards), particularly Altos del Cabriel in Manchuela and Aula in Utiel-Requena.
 
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