This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
As you know, the range of options we offer at Arzuaga is currently one of the most comprehensive in Spain. Food and drink, rest and relaxation, wine tourism… But all of these elements always have one thing in common: wine. Wine and the highest quality have been our raison d’être for over two decades, which is why we love to use this blog as a space for sharing some of the characteristics of the different wines we make. Today, we’d like to tell you about one of our wines that’s very special, as it’s classed as a vino de pago, a classification applied to individual vineyards or wine estates that have special and unique characteristics, something we already talked about in this post on our blog. The wine we’re referring to is our Pago Florentino 2019.
Once again, we turn to our Global Brand Ambassador Jesús Bernad to discover the keys to the uniqueness of our Pago Florentino wine. The grapes used to make this red wine come from a vineyard found in Malagón, in the province of Ciudad Real; it is south-facing and flanked by two natural lagoons.
As Bernad points out, ‘the high altitude of this area in the La Mancha region and the hours of sunshine it receives enable the vineyard’s star variety, Cencibel – as Tempranillo is called in Castile-La Mancha – to ripen fully, producing wines that have a mature character and are bursting with fruit’. Our Pago Florentino wine is made exclusively from this Cencibel variety, ‘whose bunches are harvested in small 15-kilo boxes, and the grapes undergo cold and low-temperature maceration for three days, to then spend 12 months ageing in French and American oak barrels,’ Bernad explains.
Moving on to the tasting, the visual phase gives us an ‘impressive Picota cherry red colour with violet glints’. On the nose, we find a ‘very alluring’ wine, ‘with abundant forest berries, such as blackberries and blueberries, over enveloping hints of liquorice and notes of roasted coffee, dark chocolate, with toasted notes from the barrel and a touch of incense’.
Finally, when it comes to the palate, Bernad highlights that this wine ‘is powerful, but with a pleasant, very expressive attack, with bags of ripe red fruits, and balanced with its good acidity’. He also concludes that ‘it has body and a long velvety persistence with hints of roasted coffee’.
When thinking about the perfect pairing, Bernad advises us to accompany this Pago Florentino 2019 with ‘barbecued red meats and game dishes, such as hare with chocolate, veal stew and semi-mature cheese from La Mancha’.
If you’re wanting to try our Pago Florentino now after reading this post, you can get it from the Arzuaga online shop!