Organic. Sometimes it’s good to let the winegrower do the talking. Here’s Marc Isart: “So many wines are made just for impact, but you can only drink one glass of them. My goal is to produce grower wines. Wines that can be drunk daily. Wines that are more savoury than sweet. Wines where it is hard to stop drinking.”
Isart’s old, low yielding bush vines lie around the small village of Valdilecha, and his estate is named after the historic nickname of the area—La Maldición: ‘the curse’. It was called this by the locals as it was so difficult to eke out a living from such isolated, high-altitude rocky soils. Applied here, Isart’s organic viticulture, pick-on-freshness, natural yeast, lo-fi regime results in wines that are as juicy and fresh as they are delicious, yet they are certainly more straight-shooting and thirst quenching in style than the Bernabeleva wines; a reality that is reflected in their pricing.
Now simply labelled Tinto Fino (the wine was previously called Tinto de Valdilecha), this is a blend of 80% mature-vine Tempranillo (from Valdilecha at 780 metres) with the local white grape Malvar (from Belmonte at a similar altitude) making up the balance. The vines are all biodynamically reared and the grapes hand-harvested. Both varieties were co-fermented with natural yeasts, then the wine spent 20-25 days on skins and was aged in cement and stainless-steel tanks.