Winemaker Notes
This wine is very special, with a complexity that makes it different from the rest of wines at the winery. The Pino is made from a single "Bobal vineyard". The wine has a magnificent and minerally personality because it grows on solid rock. With aromas of gypsum and wet chalk, the palate shows great acidity and dried rose petal notes, finishing with a delightful balsamic taste.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The single-vineyard red 2020 Pino is intense and pure, with character and balance. It was produced with the Bobal grapes from a plot of one hectare of 40-year-old vines at 800 meters in altitude, fermented with full clusters and indigenous yeasts in oak vas and matured in oval 3,500-liter oak foudre for 10 months. It's ripe at 14% alcohol and has mellow acidity and good freshness. This is very dark and radically different from the one-off 2019 I tasted next to it. This is powerful, intense and tannic, a wine that needs more time to polish the edges. This is more in the style of the 2018.
Bobal is enjoying a mini renaissance in Spain today as high-elevation vineyards in its homeland of Utiel-Requena produce dense and velvety wines dominated by dark berry and cocoa characteristics. However, its function as Spain’s second most planted red grape variety was once only for bulk wine and concentrate. Since it is drought-resistant, it does well grown as unirrigated bush vines and acts as a fine voice of terroir. Somm Secret—Bobal also shows great potential for rosé and sparkling wines because of its high levels of acidity and anthocyanins.
The Moors gave it the name, ‘Manxa,’ which fittingly means ‘parched earth.’ La Mancha, the largest Spanish wine producing region in all of Spain, is one of its hottest and driest. Sturdy and drought-resistant white varieietes like Airen, Viura and Verdejo thrive in this environment.