Here’s something a little different. Castaño is a winery from the Yecla region of Spain in its southeast, inland from Valencia and Alicante. In the Yecla its hot and dry, and the most commonly grown grape is Monastrell (in French, Mourvèdre), which produces tannic, high alcohol wines with earthy, red fruit flavours. Traditionally, grapes from the Yecla have been used to beef up the strength of other more famed export oriented wines from Spain. These days wineries such as Castaño are working with some success to promote the virtues of wines from the Monastrell grape for themselves. For so called “new world” tastes, however, it takes some willingness to try something a little different from the standard sweet fruit flavours of, for instance, California Cabernet or Australian shiraz. I decided to open the bottle over a slow cooked beef stew meal. The wine was a deep garnet colour, and on the nose smelled almost disconcertingly of black pepper and spice with an unexpected hint of tomato. In the mouth it was light to medium bodied but grippy, with an unfortunate sour cherry flavour vying with the considerable tannins for an abrupt finish. And Robert Parker, the doyen of wine critics, gave this wine 90 points? I decided to decanter it and leave it a day. I came back to it over lunch the following day with a toasted beef and aged cheese sandwich with dijon mustard (had to use the left over meat!). The day really helped. The pepper was still there on the nose, but the wine seemed less dusty, and a sweeter oak scent was detectible. In the mouth the sourness faded to reveal a gentle raspberry flavour. The tannins still held sway, and suggest this wine needs another few years to balance out. But the extra day helped. If you are to drink this wine now, you will need some food, and probably something fatty and salty. Maybe a marbled steak with Montreal spice. Available in the SGLA for around $13, this is a good wine to have on a Friday night, as long as you can get someone to decant it for you at lunch time!
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