This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
As you know, at Bodegas Arzuaga, we’re trying to turn our social media into something else fun for you to do, to make the lockdown a bit more pleasant and allow you to learn more about a passion we all share: wine.
In this post today, we’d like to share with you some of the notes from Javier Herrero, Bodegas Arzuaga’s cellarman, when he tasted one of our winery’s most special reds: Amaya Arzuaga. In the video tasting filmed at his home, before starting the tasting stages themselves, Herrero explained that ‘this is a wine with very limited production at the winery,’ since we only make 3,000 bottles per year.
As regards this production, Herrero rightly points out that this red wine ‘is made using whole-cluster fermentation’. What does that mean, though? It means that we put the entire cluster of grapes in the wooden vat, just as it was harvested in the field, with the stems, which provide very interesting vegetable notes. The grapes used for this wine – 95% Tempranillo and 5% Albillo (a white variety) – come from hundred-year-old vineyards, with very limited yields, and the production process is also fairly unusual.
As Herrero explains, ‘for the alcoholic fermentation, what we’re going to do is tread it using our feet’. Mechanical means are also avoided to keep the stems from giving unnecessary greenness, doing the ‘pump-over and punching down using tubs’.
Moving on to the tasting itself and the appearance stage, Herrero notes that ‘it’s a very bright wine, with a fairly intense colour, very brilliant, very clean, a shade of Picota cherry red’. Turning to the nose, we discover that this ‘is a wine with lots of ripe red fruit, typical of Ribera del Duero and the Tempranillo variety, lots of spice and very floral’. But at this point, we also find ‘those vegetable tones, those tones the stem gives us during the fermentation and that make this wine different’. Herrero also notes that after 22 months of barrel ageing with racking only taking place twice, there is a ‘perfect harmony between the wine and the fruit and the oak; very subtle and very elegant’. On the palate, Herrero points out the body of the Amaya Arzuaga 2015. A ‘very subtle, very unctuous, very velvety’ wine on the palate, and one that is ‘very elegant’.
We hope, once again, that our video tastings help you to have a nice time during this lockdown and to learn a bit more about our Arzuaga wines. These days… #StayHome and #DiscoverArzuaga.