Wine of the Week

Someone forgot to photograph the label…thanks to Juan Carlos for this one!

Ad Libitum 2020 - Bodegas Juan Carlos Sancha

D.O. - Rioja (Alta)

Varieties – 100% Maturana Tinta

ABV - 13.5%

£11.42 from Decántalo

I’m feeling a little rusty for my first WotW feature of 2022, so I’m glad to be on the familiar ground of Rioja, but not as you know it! I first heard of Maturana Tinta when visiting the excellent Tom Puyaubert from Exopto last year. His portfolio of wines are fabulous, but it was his fantastic El Espinal that struck me! ‘Maturana what now??’ I was keen to learn and slurp more!

I happened to be flicking (well, scrolling) through Tim Atkin’s Rioja report (geeky, I know) and Juan Carlos Sancha was receiving lots of praise from the mighty Tim! And rightly so I’ve since discovered! After doing a little digging, one thing I’m grateful for is that without Juan Carlos this grape may have never graced my palate in the first place! God bless you Juan Carlos Sancha and this minority grape!

The look of the wine in the glass is very inviting…bright, shiny…saying dive in! On the nose there’s lots of redcurrant and a good bit of cherry, with some suggestion of sweetness. However, when tasting the wine that sweetness switches to savouriness, meatiness almost, again with some nice cherries in there. Being from a cooler part of Rioja it has a higher acidity which I like, bringing a nice balance and freshness to the wine.

For me, this is a really intriguing wine. It’s almost like the purest expression of wine…as wine was intended to be. Natural as natural can be! Juan Carlos says ‘good wines come from good grapes’ and I completely sense that here. It’s almost as if the grapes are of such good quality, nothing has been done to them!

I’m a big fan of this wine and fortunately for me Ad Libitum means ‘free to do as you wish,’ so I did…I finished the bottle! Salud!