By now the vast majority of our overseas orders for Christmas have long since left our cellars, leaving us to tackle the orders of our Spanish customers, plus a few others for the gift market. One of our best sellers at Christmas time is our Vendimia Seleccionada Barrica wine, which, owing to its extended barrel ageing, takes us several months to prepare.

Over recent weeks the orders for this wine have accelerated rapidly, and so we thought it prudent to bottle just a few barrels more (that sounds a bit like a movie title). I say ‘latest’, but the wine we are bottling is in fact from the 2010 vintage – a ripe, full and fruity wine that stands up well to the toasted vanillin of the French oak that we use. As a wine purist, I admit that I am not a great fan of mixing oak and albariño, but I have to say that this particular vintage works very well and the wine has pleasantly surprised many a sceptic (such as me)! I should add that we do not make this wine in every vintage, which is why we call it ‘vendimia seleccionada’, so once this 2010 is exhausted we will have to work out what the follow up vintage is going to be. It takes a certain style of wine to marry with the oak (and not be simply overpowered by it).

In an ideal world we would never send a recently bottled wine straight out to the customer,  and so today’s bottling is really intended more as an insurance, just in case the Christmas rush continues (and between you and me I hope it does!)

By the way, just in case you are curious, this wine is not actually fermented in oak, but merely aged in oak – fermented in stainless steel using the same vinification as our unoaked wines, and then passed through French oak as required. Just to put this into some sort of perspective, this is almost a ‘garagiste’ wine, as the annual production amounts to only a few thousand bottles.

This only leaves us with one question…… does it go with turkey? Well, to be very honest I haven’t tried it, but my best guess is that it would be just perfect!

By now the vast majority of our overseas orders for Christmas have long since left our cellars, leaving us to tackle the orders of our Spanish customers, plus a few others for the gift market. One of our best sellers at Christmas time is our Vendimia Seleccionada Barrica wine, which, owing to its extended barrel ageing, takes us several months to prepare.

Over recent weeks the orders for this wine have accelerated rapidly, and so we thought it prudent to bottle just a few barrels more (that sounds a bit like a movie title). I say ‘latest’, but the wine we are bottling is in fact from the 2010 vintage – a ripe, full and fruity wine that stands up well to the toasted vanillin of the French oak that we use. As a wine purist, I admit that I am not a great fan of mixing oak and albariño, but I have to say that this particular vintage works very well and the wine has pleasantly surprised many a sceptic (such as me)! I should add that we do not make this wine in every vintage, which is why we call it ‘vendimia seleccionada’, so once this 2010 is exhausted we will have to work out what the follow up vintage is going to be. It takes a certain style of wine to marry with the oak (and not be simply overpowered by it).

In an ideal world we would never send a recently bottled wine straight out to the customer,  and so today’s bottling is really intended more as an insurance, just in case the Christmas rush continues (and between you and me I hope it does!)

By the way, just in case you are curious, this wine is not actually fermented in oak, but merely aged in oak – fermented in stainless steel using the same vinification as our unoaked wines, and then passed through French oak as required. Just to put this into some sort of perspective, this is almost a ‘garagiste’ wine, as the annual production amounts to only a few thousand bottles.

This only leaves us with one question…… does it go with turkey? Well, to be very honest I haven’t tried it, but my best guess is that it would be just perfect!