Maruxa, Valdeorras, Mencía

If you haven't had wine from the Mencia grape before, please try one! This is a delicious example from one of the grape's homeplaces, Valdeorras, which is in the north of Spain, sitting right on top of Portugal. Crunchy and fresh, this is a style of wine that you could get Very Used To and find that the bottles tend to be leaky, if you get what I mean. This is lovely wine... easy to drink, approachable in style and excellent for matching with food. Black fruits, freshness and low tannins make it a little like a Spanish Pinot Noir with a little more grit and colour.

Mencia is a grape variety in the ascendancy and even reading the above should give you some idea of why: the food-matching  capabilities are immense and the freshness of palate and flavour profile put it right into the middle of modern trends without any effort at all. In fact, the change in modern preferences is almost best-suited to this variety because it doesn't have to do anything differently. A bit like wines made from Dolcetto in Piemonte. Only, a little prettier!

This Mencia comes from a young winery that was established in 2002 in the village of Éntoma, with 40 hectares of vineyards. They make three levels of wines: village, single-vineyard and Grand Cru, each of which have no legal meaning, it's just that they want to give reference to other great regions and some sense of classification. 

This wine is from the Village-level collection and is named after the founder's mother. Maruxa is a regional diminutive of Maria... Made from hand picked grapes grown in four different locations, this wine is carefully made by cholling the grape must, destemming the bunches but with no grape crushing, in order to bet preserve freshness and varietal typicity. All the vines are hand-harvested, too.

The last interesting bit (well, it's interesting for us...) is that this small, provincial winery that is really very young, caught the attention of the wine world by its simple vision and the brilliant, clear and vibrant qualities of the wines that they produce. So much so that in 2017 our friends in CUNE began the process to buy the winery. And that's how we came across it ourselves! Under their guidance, the international markets have been opened and the resources needed to maintain amazing vineyards and winery facilities have been made fully available.

Their differentiation of wine levels is about place, and as Antonio Galloni notes, "Place matters, and that's why I'm so happy to see the approach taken by CVNE from Rioja after they bought Virgen del Galir". Which is nice.