Finca Bacara Black Skull Monastrell Jumilla 2022
£16.45
The wine
The senior wine in the Time Waits For No One range, and the most serious. Old-vine Monastrell from organically farmed parcels, given longer in oak: dense black fruit, liquorice and dark chocolate over a firm, structured palate. The matt-black skull bottle has become something of a cult object.
Black Skull is the most serious wine in the range, from old dry-farmed Monastrell bush vines and given extended oak ageing. Monastrell gives deep colour, firm tannin and a savoury, faintly gamey character that sets it apart from the softer Spanish reds further north, and it takes barrel work readily.
The producer
Finca Bacara
View all Finca Bacara winesFinca Bacara farms at Jumilla in Murcia, in the arid south-east of Spain, on around 800 hectares of estate vineyard. The labels are among the more striking in Spain and have made the wines instantly recognisable.
Jumilla is Monastrell country. The grape is Mourvedre in France and Mataro in Australia, and it needs more heat than almost any other variety to ripen, which is why it flourishes in a region receiving barely 300 millimetres of rain a year. The vineyards sit at 700 to 800 metres on poor limestone, and the old bush vines are dry-farmed by necessity. Jumilla also escaped phylloxera longer than most of Europe because of its sandy soils, and ungrafted vines survive there.
Those conditions produce concentrated fruit at very low yields, and Jumilla has become one of the best-value serious wine regions in Europe. The estate is farmed organically.
