And welcome to another day of tasting and eating. We started off our day with a beauty, Ysios wines. The building is a piece of architectural masterpiece, the lines are perfect, the sin wave matches the mountains, The place echos like St. Peter’s cathedral. It’s truly a spiritual experience to even be there.
The owners have a lot of money and want to give an experience . They also have some of the oldest vines in the rioja regions and wines that are literally still hand crushed. Frank family in Napa, owned by the Disney heirs, strikes a similar note of opulence and dedication to a great product…and they have more money than God so they CAN do it.
Additionally, the wine is very good.
So, rioja. Most of the wines are nearly 100% Tempranillo grapes, sheltered to the north and south by mountain ranges that prevent extremes. Since phylloxera happened (link if you don’t know what that is) most vines are newer. This pest nearly killed old country wines, and so the unique process of saving the cultures aims splicing is incredibly interesting…you know, if you’re a wine nerd that loves science. This area is prime for growing deep bodied red grapes, but regulations of growing do limit varietals so a lot of the difference is soil composition and age of vines to distimguish perfection from ‘meh’.
Second up, remirez de ganuza, family owned and fairly limited production. The property and people were lovely, art of the owners son donning the walls. Because I am a wine lover and not an expert, I will leave specific tasting details to those that claim to be experts, but my general consensus is that the estate wines for remirez were outstanding. Full bodied but not so much tannin that you chew your face afterward.
Upon return, Anna and I did a tour of the town on our own, wandering the marrow streets. If you’ve been to pitigliano in Italy, it is very much like this. Beautiful, everything smells like a bakery or smoking meat, pintxo places abound.
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