Bodegas Bhilar Blanco Rioja Alavesa 2024
£16.25
The wine
The estate white from David Sampedro and Melanie Hickman, made from Viura grown biodynamically on the limestone soils around Elvillar. Ploughed by horse, fermented without fuss and given time on its lees, this is white Rioja with texture and savoury grip rather than simple freshness.
Viura is Rioja's principal white grape, called Macabeo in Catalonia where it goes into Cava. Bhilar farm biodynamically and use horses rather than tractors, and the wine is made with minimal intervention, so what reaches the glass is the chalky clay of Rioja Alavesa rather than the cellar.
The producer
Bodegas Bhilar
View all Bodegas Bhilar winesA boutique winery at Elvillar in Rioja Alavesa, run by the husband-and-wife team David Sampedro and Melanie Hickman. They make terroir-driven wines from indigenous grapes, and the farming is as serious as the winemaking.
The land has been worked organically for over twenty years and biodynamically for fifteen of those, and in 2014 horses replaced tractors in the vineyards altogether. Horses compact the soil far less than machinery, which matters on the poor limestone soils of the Alavesa where root depth and soil life do much of the work. The estate is Demeter certified, the international biodynamic standard.
Phinca is the Basque spelling of finca, meaning plot, and the top wines are named for the individual parcels they come from rather than blended to a house style. Rioja Alavesa is the coolest and highest of Rioja's sub-regions, sitting in the lee of the Sierra de Cantabria on chalky clay, and it gives wines of more perfume and finer tannin than the warmer areas further east.
