There are some wines that just put a smile on your face. This may sound like a whimsical quality in wine, but let’s face it, some wines just have it and most wines don’t. Horacio Calvente’s dry Moscatel has it in spades. It comes with a brilliant story, too. A wine-mad farmer from the ancient Moorish village of Jete sets out to recover an almost extinct wine style from neglected parcel of old vine Moscatel planted high – 1000m high - in the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range overlooking the Mediterranean. His first vintage in 1992 yields just 700 bottles which are mostly distributed amongst family and friends. Two decades on and the produce of this unique resuscitated vineyard is now close to 5,000 cases. The wine – feted by the Spanish wine cognoscenti - graces the shelves of Spain’s top wine stores and its finest restaurants. This of course would mean little if the wine wasn’t so darn fascinating and delicious.
We were alerted to this captivating cottage industry by our friend and Spanish wine authority Jesús Barquín, who some will recognise as one of the founders of the amazing Navazos Project. The Navazos forgotten treasure blueprint shares some similarities here; a commercially unviable vineyard or a wine style out of sync with commercial reality, revived, but not for reasons of social prestige. Horacio Calvente, a modest man, only began experimenting in wine production 20 years ago. He was spurned on to rescue these inaccessible vineyards by his passion for this unique site and the wine’s history in regional culture. The eight hectares of La Guindalera pago seem to hang off the mountain. The Moscatel de Alejandria bush vines average 60-70 years of age although some vines are well into their 2nd century. This variety of Muscat has strong historical ties to the region, although in modern times the finest, remote terroirs have been abandoned. Today most of Spain’s Moscatel de Alejandria serves the wine industry, typically ending up as sweet Moscatel.
The 2010 La Guindalera is dry, aromatic, powdery, mineral, wildly distinctive white that is imbued with citric freshness. The aromas leaping from the glass offer such a cornucopia of scents it's... read more
