This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
As part of our commitment to innovation and evolution in winemaking, at Bodegas Arzuaga, we’ve brought our latest wine project out on the market: Aprisco. Aprisco is a single-variety white wine for laying down made from Albillo Mayor, available in the 2019 vintage and hailing from the DO Ribera del Duero appellation.
The name of the wine is, as Bodegas Arzuaga’s managing director Ignacio Arzuaga explains, a tribute to ‘those old shelters where sheep were kept to spend the night’. As he goes on to clarify, ‘In honour of those shelters, we’ve related safeguarding the sheep to this wine for laying down’.
Aprisco is made only using Albillo Mayor grapes that come from our vineyard on the Olivares de Duero moor, at 880 metres above sea level. After a process whereby the wine ages for around two years in 225-litre French oak barrels, and then for around eight months in concrete eggs, the result is a creamy, complex and gourmet wine.
‘This is a wine where the lees have been worked a lot in the barrel to look for that complexity, that creaminess, that body, without losing the acidity that might be the main characteristic alongside the very slightly oxidative notes of this variety,’ notes Arzuaga.
Among the characteristics of Aprisco, Arzuaga points out that ‘it’s a wine with a long life ahead of it; we can drink it or age it since we consider it a white wine for laying down, something that’s not very common in Ribera del Duero’.
In recent years, as you know, at Bodegas Arzuaga we’ve strengthened our commitment to making gourmet wines, and this is also the case with this new Aprisco, a wine ‘for fusing with the new cooking concept that combines many spices, flavours and cuisines from different countries. A perfect white for pairing with more complex recipes thanks to its power, but also its elegance’.
Tasting of Aprisco 2019
At visual level, Aprisco has a straw-yellow colour reminiscent of wheat. In terms of smell, it’s a wine with a great deal of aromatic intensity, very potent and structured, but where there aren’t excessive notes of wood thanks to the months spent ageing in the concrete eggs. It’s a wine that has complexity, notes of nuts such as hazelnut and almond shell, and mineral notes that take us to the soil where the vines are found. On the palate, it’s a creamy, powerful wine that fills the palate and is persistent, with a well-defined acidity that’s going to provide freshness despite being a wine for laying down.