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Spring has come and with it, we invite you to a personal tasting of our 2020 Rosae with Javier Bañales, Arzuaga’s sales manager and brand ambassador. ‘2020 has been one of the most difficult and unique years in the history of humanity, but after a long and cold winter, there’s always the light and flowers of spring. And that’s why we want to bring you this wine, Arzuaga Rosae 2020’: this is the start to a tasting where Bañales takes us through a wine that’s as unique as it is delicate.
When talking about Rosae, Bañales points out that this wine has a ‘very interesting, fresh concept that really represents our definition of what a rosé should be’. As you know, Arzuaga Rosae is a wine made exclusively with Tempranillo grapes from vineyards located on our La Planta estate at 911 metres above sea level. To make it, we use the same grapes that we use for our La Planta wine, with the distinctiveness that the land where the grapes are grown gives to them. ‘We harvest these grapes at their best moment of ripeness, at their best phenolic moment, which for us means that they’re full of colours, aromas and flavours, all favoured by the altitude,’ notes Arzuaga’s sales manager. In terms of its production method, Rosae is made from the first grapes we harvest, which are pressed very lightly to give the wine its characteristic colour. ‘This is a wine where we were looking for something different; we like to say that it’s a Tempranillo with the colour of rose petals,’ explains Bañales, who goes on to talk about the fermentation of this very special wine.
‘While a wine normally ferments for six to ten days, in this case, it’s different. This one ferments just once, for 20 to 25 days, always below 12°C. So, little by little, we get all the aromas, all the style, all the pureness characteristic of Tempranillo from Ribera del Duero. The idea is to find the elegance and the more gastronomic part of the wine,’ he says. When we talk about Rosae, we find a wine that’s perfect to drink in summer, but the evolution in the bottle continues and it’s also a wine to enjoy for the end of the year. ‘It will have kept its freshness, but we’ll be able to recognise the maturity, the elegant notes on the nose and more richness on the palate,’ he points out.
Finally, if we focus on the tasting itself, Bañales highlights some keys to this Arzuaga Rosae: ‘The wine is a little lighter than the 2019 vintage, elegant and fresh on the nose. It’s very Arzuaga, with notes of strawberries, where we can also find floral reminiscences and tropical notes with a medium and elegant intensity. On the palate, you can notice the Tempranillo, the character, the origin of this wine. It’s a wine with a great balance, and in the finish, we find the classic Arzuaga feeling that we always look for in our wines’.