Viños de Encostas O Con Albariño 2022
£29.45
The wine
Delicate aromatic notes of peach skin, mandarin peel and honeysuckle mingle with sea breeze and a subtle creaminess. There is tension and focus here that amplifies on the palate, giving stone fruit, orange skin and jasmine. Texture, complexity and energy are the watchwords.
O Con is a single vineyard in Rías Baixas, and the wine is made in a considerably more serious register than most Albariño: lower yields, wild fermentation and extended lees ageing. Albariño has the acidity and structure to age far longer than its reputation as a summer wine suggests.
The producer
Viños de Encostas
View all Viños de Encostas winesVinos de Encostas is the project of Luis Anxo Rodriguez Vazquez, one of the growers most responsible for the revival of serious wine in inland Galicia. Encostas means slopes, which is where the interesting vineyards are.
His argument, made through the wines rather than in words, is that Galicia's inland regions were unfairly overshadowed when Rias Baixas took off in the 1980s. Ribeiro has the longer history, exporting to England in the fifteenth century, and Valdeorras holds Godello, a variety reduced to a handful of hectares by the 1970s and now regarded as one of Spain's finest white grapes.
The wines are made in small quantities from old plots on steep slate and granite slopes, several of them worked by hand because nothing else can reach them. Village is a deliberate nod to Burgundy's hierarchy, and the point being made is the same: that these places deserve to be named.
