Wine of the week
Bill Bolloten joins the dots between David Bowie and a wine made from a rare local grape variety in the Axarquía region of Málaga.
El Camaleón 2019 (Viñedos Verticales)
D.O. Sierras de Málaga
Variety: Romé
ABV: 12.5%
€25.90 from Bodeboca
“Look up here, man, I'm in danger”, sang David Bowie in Lazarus, the last single he released in his lifetime. The lyric might be apt for the grape variety our wine of the week is made from.
Romé, the only indigenous red grape variety permitted by the regulatory council of DO Sierras de Málaga, was on the way to extinction, and until recently, all that remained were a few isolated parcels that were mainly harvested for homemade wines.
By turning their attention to this rare variety, Juan Muñoz and Vicente Inat of Viñedos Verticales are making sure that it has a future. At their bodega in Moclinejo, a small town in the Axarquía region of Málaga, the monovarietal El Camaleón is seen as the “David Bowie of the winery”: a wine with a singular personality that transmits the unique terroir of the Axarquía.
And just as Bowie had an ability to change, adapt and continually reinvent himself musically (and yes, he did release a compilation album called Chameleon), this unusual thick-skinned variety is also chameleonic with its uneven ripening that produces white, pink and red grapes in the same bunch.
The grapes for El Camaleón come from five small vineyards, all of them between 700 m and 1000 m in altitude, in Santo Pitar, Corumbela and Sedella. The soils are mostly slate and black phyllite rock.
On the vertiginous slopes of the Axarquía, one of Spain’s viticultura heroica regions, the harvesting is done by hand and the grapes loaded onto mules.
The must is fermented with ambient yeasts in a lightly toasted 2000 litre wooden vat and remains with the skins for several weeks until pressing. Malolactic fermentation takes place in the same vat and the wine is then aged for 10 months on its lees.
El Camaleón has a pale ruby colour with garnet hues. The nose shows sweet red fruit, orange skin and cherry liqueur, along with herbal notes. It’s quite broad and ripe in the mouth, with fine tannins, some creaminess and light spice. But the fruit is not at all exuberant, with the slaty minerality of its terroir really coming through on the finish. I’m not surprised that Axarquía winemaker Clara Verheij of Bodegas Bentomiz (who make a Romé rosado) described Romé as having a “brutal minerality”.
But don’t be put off by this. The El Camaleón is not just subtle, original and nuanced, it’s also a wine that genuinely speaks of its unique sense of place.