Bodegas Bhilar Phinca La Revilla Blanco Rioja Alavesa 2015
£66.45
The wine
A truly distinctive Viura with complex and layered nuances of balsamic notes, chamomile and savoury hints, through to a textured and beautifully balanced palate with a chalky sensation and a long finish. A decade in bottle and still gaining.
La Revilla is a single parcel, and this white is released with several years of age. Traditional white Rioja was made to age for decades, oxidatively and in oak, before fashion turned towards freshness in the 1970s. Wines like this belong to that older tradition, and Viura repays the patience with nutty, honeyed depth.
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.
