Bodegas Resalte de Peñafiel Peña Roble Ribera del Duero Joven 2024
£15.25
The wine
Expressive aromas of red fruit, sweet cherry and hints of liquorice are enhanced by harmonious oaky undertones. A modern wine with a smooth texture and good weight, carrying ripe fruit across the palate with delicious hints of spice through to a long finish.
Joven means young, a wine released without significant oak ageing. In Ribera del Duero, where almost everything is aged at length, this is the unusual bottling: Tinto Fino, the local strain of Tempranillo with smaller berries and thicker skins, made to show fruit and freshness rather than barrel character.
The producer
Bodegas Resalte de Peñafiel
View all Bodegas Resalte de Peñafiel winesBodegas Resalte de Penafiel was founded in 2000 at Penafiel, the town at the heart of Ribera del Duero beneath its extraordinary boat-shaped castle. The estate farms old Tempranillo vines on the high plateau above the river.
Ribera del Duero is a severe place to grow grapes. The vineyards sit at 750 to 900 metres on the Castilian meseta, where summer days reach forty degrees and nights fall away sharply, and frost is a genuine threat well into spring. That extreme diurnal range is precisely what makes the wines: deep colour and ripe fruit from the heat, firm acidity and aromatic definition from the cold nights.
Tempranillo here is called Tinto Fino or Tinta del Pais, a local strain with smaller berries and thicker skins than the Rioja version, and it gives darker, more structured wines. The appellation was only created in 1982, though Vega Sicilia had been making wine there since 1864, and it has risen faster than almost any region in Spain.
