2017 Benje Blanco

The white 2017 Benje Blanco is produced with Listán Blanco (a.k.a. Palomino) grapes from Santiago del Teide. After their experience working in Montilla Moriles with flor, they started using it here too. So, in 2017, 35% of the wine matured in concrete vats with a layer of flor yeasts (and that percentage goes up to 60% in 2018!), as they like the result—it sharpens the wines and makes them finer. It also gives the wine a spicy twist, more complexity and depth, more nuance. The wine is only around 12%, and despite that, the flor is quite healthy and thick, more in the style of Sherry than Jura. It has a little bit of nut and a yeasty character, very subtle—perhaps also aided by the Mediterranean year—and the palate is sharp and dry, serious and tasty. The volume that does not age in concrete with flor is in topped-up 228-liter barrels, and the élevage was around seven months. They now work more vineyards in the zone. They have vineyards to produce some 22,000 bottles, but they only produced 15,000 bottles because they had to discard a lot of grapes because of the heat wave. It was bottled in June 2018.