2017 Blanco Vinas Viejas Albillo

The white 2017 Albillo Viñas Viejas comes from the toughest harvest in recent years, a growing season marked by severe frosts followed by a warm summer and an early harvest. Despite everything, the wine is only 13% alcohol and has a pH of 3.14, meaning there's a lot of freshness here despite being harvested after some of the earlier reds. The grapes come from organically farmed vines at an average of 880 meters in altitude in the village of La Aguilera, where the soils are rich in red clay, limestone and sand. This is the Albillo Mayor from Ribera del Duero, unrelated to the other Albillo (Real, Criollo...) from vines that are over 100 years old, some ungrafted. The clusters were foot trodden, and the juice put in oak casks to ferment slowly with indigenous yeasts and without stirring the lees or anything, using minimum doses of sulfur. The wine matured in oak barrels for 35 months before it was hand bottled without being filtered or fined. This has a very Burgundian profile—it's aromatic, expressive, open, smoky, spicy and flinty. But this overdelivers for the adverse conditions of the harvest; it has very good balance and is tasty, intense and chalky, not quite reaching the electricity of the 2016, but it has its character. This is approachable now, perhaps not as long lived as the 2016 but perhaps easier to understand by a wider audience. A real triumph for the vintage. Bravo! 3,847 bottles and 10 magnums were filled in September 2020.