Casa Aurora “La Nave” Mencia 2023
Availability: 5 in stock
$21.99
La Nave is Casa Aurora’s entry point. A regional wine from Albares, in Bierzo Alto, mostly from north-face vineyards planted on rocky and clay soils, averaging about 75-years of age, it is made mostly from Mencia, with a bit of Tintorera and Palomino. The grapes are destemmed and the wines are made in open 400 liter French oak barrels. It was aged for 13 months in foudre and tanks before bottling. The 2023 La Nave comes in at an even thirteen percent alcohol and delivers a superb aromatic constellation of dark berries, black cherries, espresso, tree bark, a complex base of dark soil tones, cigar smoke and incipient notes of Bierzo botanicals in the upper register. On the palate the wine is pure, full-bodied, focused and complex, with a superb core of fruit, ripe, buried tannins, fine balance and a long, youthful and promising finish. This deserves some hibernation time to blossom properly. It will be a fine bottle of Bierzo Tinto, even if the vines lie just outside of the official boundaries of the DO!
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Casa Aurora is German Blanco’s homage to his great-grandmother, one of the first female miners in Spain, who raised him in Albares de la Ribera, a small village in Leon.
Here, in a tiny hamlet just outside the Bierzo DO, German makes pure wines from micro-vineyards that dot the landscape, and are usually planted with very old vines of a variety of different grapes: Palomino, Mencia, Tintorera, Merenzao, Godello, Garnacha… The high-altitude and the iron-rich clay soils of the area gives these mountain wines a great balance between a soft mouthfeel and firm tannins. There is also a fair amount of granitic rocks in the terroir, and these are probably responsible for the floral, distinctive aromas of the wines.
His line-up consists of a few single-vineyard labeled wines, as well as regional ones, and the production – under 10.000 bottles – comes from a mix of purchased fruit as well as from owned vineyards. He farms organically and the wines, made in a tiny cellar as charming as his labels, are made from spontaneous fermentations in a variety of vessels, including amphorae, old foudres, and tanks.
