Camins del Priorat/The Spanish Thing Continues

So another Spanish lady in red being reviewed this week. Having been lucky enough to manage two seats at a "meet the winemaker" lunch in Dublin this week. Now we did managed to taste a few wines we don't intend buying again until we have real wages! Besides the point, the wine in question was a kind parting gift to all who attended the meal. Now, as it goes, freebies are never freebies, there's always some sort of catch. Here, in this case with a room full of 50-60 people you'd expected that the wine wouldn't be up to much. Rather the opposite actually! This wine was in fact something completely different altogether. A better kind of freebie, a show off freebie.

The star of the show was an entry level wine from Mr Palacios' Priorat vineyards. What is this wonderful concoction? 50% Somsó, 40% Garnacha (Grenache to you and me), 10% Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. Really it's a good slap of whatever you like.

Now, it is a very rare occasion I get excited about wines but this one, was again different. Pop, the cork came out, I left the room for a decanter and chugged the wine into the said object on return. In need of a glass I left the room for a second, merely to wash a glass and again return. In the minute that it took to leave and return to the room it had filled up with a beautiful sweet aroma of fresh wild berries. And so my giddiness started. Swirling the glass, my nose found itself the victim of what can only be described as a delicately soft yet concentrated assaulted by a combination of alluring aromas, first it began with an all consuming elegant and softly expressed blueberry. Once this began to open the wine began to offer something I have not experienced from a wine in rather a long time. A beautiful and ever expanding list of notes, a development from one thing to another, the nose was truly alive. A fresh swath of leafy aromas began to flood in around the blueberries at the heart of the nose, tobacco, mint, violet and rose petal, all dancing entrickedly to form an expression of what this wine is. 

Even within these notes a constant flowing evolution was in flux, the tobacco opened from a leafiness to an ash to an empty echo of it's presence, a lingering feature that added nothing short of a curious and wrapped beauty to the wine. 

The blueberry suddenly exploded, raspberry, blackberry and still a persistently strong core vein of blueberry began to wash almost caressingly over the wine. Filling in the crevasses between the leafy texture.

So, it was finally time to taste the wine. What was offer was nothing less than mind blowing. The strong tightness pulled at the blueberry that characterises a very rare but elegant display of talent on the wine markers part, too often blueberry is lost or fat on the palate, squashed and poorly expressed. Not here. The length of the finish was almost haunting, and it became an opening phase for the rest of the expressions of the nose to flood onto the palate, now with added touches of cedar, and sweet spice, with cinnamon notes dominating. 

The berries on the nose further evolved on the palate; with blueberries and blackberry forming with structural brilliance on the palate a new fruit entered the stage. Strawberries the light refreshing succulent dash played a cord too. The tannic content of the wine also began to reveal itself, with the front of the mouth tightening firmly and offering some bottle life. The wine without doubts has surpassed much of what I have tasted in the last while and is definitely something that shall be tasted again.