Pequeñas Puertas La Moribunda 2018

Part of the single-vineyard bottlings from the collaboration between Viña Zorzal and Matías Michelini, the 2018 Pequeñas Puertas La Moribunda was produced with Tempranillo from a plot they call Las Roscas, which had been abandoned (moribunda means "the dying one") before the estate rescued it! It's a head-pruned, 35-year-old vineyard, a north-facing plot with complex soils, covered in boulders à la Châteauneuf-du-Pape and with a mixture of limestone, sandstone and slate. It fermented in an open-top 500-liter oak barrel with 100% full clusters and indigenous yeasts and matured in that barrel for 15 months. This has a reductive personality. It helped the wines to be kept without sulfur until bottling. It has notes of licorice, blackberries, somewhat austere and faintly varietal. It's a fleshy and quite tannic expression of the grape, with good ripeness without excess. This might need a little more time in bottle. 660 bottles produced. It was bottled in March 2020. - Luis Gutiérrez.