Agricola La Portera Tardano Garnacha 2022

Argicola La Portera is a winemaking project by partners Javier del Blanco, Francisco Santiso and Jorge Navascues--all wonderful Spanish winemakers in their own right. The project was born in 2017 with the desire to bottle small parcels of old vine Bobal from Javier’s home region of Valencia. The original vineyard is in the tiny village of La Portera which gives its name to the wine. In 2019 the project was expanded to a Garnacha sourced from a couple of plots in Carinena.

The goal of the La Portera project is to produce wines that showcase both the grape variety and a sense of place. The La Portera wines are fermented with indigenous yeasts and aged in neutral vessels, mostly concrete which results in elegant rather than powerful wines and showcases both wonderful grape varieties and their respected regions

The grapes for La Portera ‘Tardano’ Garnacha are sourced from two parcels in the village of Almonacid de la Sierra which sit on limestone and clay soils. The vines were planted in 1983 and sit 2100 ft. above sea level. This is a unique take on Garnacha. Full of red cherry, raspberry, licorice and hints of pepper, it is a medium bodied wine that is far from the big and over-extracted style of old-school Spanish Garnacha. Fresh and spicy, with layers of complexity that lure us back for more.