El Carretil 2013 75cl

A pure, deep and complex red showing ripe dark fruit, violets, cocoa and earth character. Seaweed, too. Full-bodied with concentrated and perfectly silky tannins leading to a clean, ripe and beautifully earthy and mineral finish. An amazing wine with a great structure. Single-vineyard bottling. Give this three to four more years. What a wine.

A wine that always feels more marked by the oak, the 2013 El Carretil showed abundant roasted notes, hints of coffee and dark chocolate, with empyreumatic sensations. This wine always had a lower pH and higher acidity, which according to López de Lacalle might be the reason why the wine is consistently more marked by the oak; I don't quite understand this, because my experience is that usually wines with higher pH and lower acidity tend to show more the effect of the oak. This will certainly require some more time in bottle, especially for the toasty notes to get integrated, because the palate does not show oak tannins, but rather the chalky austere tannins from the rather austere soils (with some 17% active limestone when the average is about 12-13%), which are whiter and quite shallow. It's also true that the wine matured in new barriques. ("I hate used barrels," Juan Carlos López de Lacalle told me. "And the problem is that we still don't get the quality of oak we want in larger barrels...") This is the oakier of all ten wines I tasted from Artadi. Will it integrate with time? I hope so, because the quality of the wine is super. There are some 4,000 bottles in 2013.<br/><br/>Artadi has left the Rioja appellation. That's big news. For now, the idea to bottle village wines from the 2014 vintage onward has been put on hold, as the names of the villages are 'owned' by the appellation. But they have discontinued Pagos Viejos, with most of those grapes going to the 2014 Viñas de Gaín; and they will bottle between 1,000 and 2,000 bottles of a different 'Pagos Viejos' to sell exclusively at the winery for the people who visit them to have access to something exclusive. They will also have a small amount of white under the name Pagos Viejos using the white grapes found intermixed in the old vineyards. They also intend to produce a new single vineyard plot (Ribaltallo), situated on very sandy and stony soils above Contino that Juan Carlos López de Lacalle planted some ten years ago, and there is also a small parcel of old vines. At the time of my tasting the 2014s had no labels, but they will most likely say only Álava-Spain. The 2013s are still under the Rioja appellation. The 2014s were in tank ready to be bottled (the bottling was delayed because they found a problem with some corks), with the sulfur adjusted and everything else ready. Even though I don't like unbottled samples, as I often find oxidative aromas, I decided to taste them because the next article on Rioja will be in some 16 months' time when I should retaste them bottled and with some bottle age together with the 2015s. On a completely different note, they have recently purchased an important wine importing and distribution business that brings to Spain wines from many of the members of L’Académie Internationale du Vin, of which López de Lacalle is a member himself; and they have also started selling direct to final customers under the name Abó & Lacalle. At the same time, they have created their own importing company in the US, Artadi USA Importers. Lots of changes for Artadi.