Teso La Monja

The eponymous top-of-the-range 2017 Teso la Monja comes from one of the driest and earliest years in history. The wine is ripe and hits the scale at 15.1% alcohol while keeping good freshness and acidity. It's always produced with the grapes from a 1.8-hectare plot that has more limestone than the average in the zone; the grapes were hand destemmed by a team of 75 people, fermented in an open oak vat and went through malolactic in an egg-shaped oak vat built by Taransaud, an "Ovum," where the wine was kept until July 2018. The élevage continued in three new Bordeaux barrels from July 2018 to February 2020 when they bottled 890 bottles. The wine is ripe and oaky, quite extroverted, aromatic and open. The vineyard receives the north wind, and it's cooler than other vineyards—the ripening is slower and very homogeneous. It's also floral, and the tannins feel a little stiff, with the chalky sensation on the palate, a texture rather than a flavor. They get only 500 kilos of grapes per hectare, which brings perfect ripeness. This is a wine that needs a long time in bottle; this is still marked by the élevage, and I still cannot picture where this is going to go, we'd need a time machine for that...