Envínate | "Lousas Viñas de Aldea" Mencía Tinto 2019

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Pair with: peppery steak dishes, Pastrami, Barbecue, Wild Game, Roast Pork, Beef Brisket

🌱 Farming: Practicing Organic

🌎 Region: Ribeira Sacra, Spain

🍇 Grape Variety: Mencía

🤓 Geek Out: It’s too hot, too humid, too tropical, too steep, too treacherous. Every wine textbook deems the 28th parallel of latitude too close to the equator for viticulture. Off the coast of Morocco lies the Canary Islands where 4 friends defy those stuffy text books. Roberto Santana, Alfonso Torrente, Laura Ramos, and José Martínez met in enology school in 2005. They formed Envínate (“wine yourself”) to explore distinctive parcels of Atlantic-influenced vines of the Canary Islands and Galicia, Spain. 

The collective strives to make pure and authentic wines that express the wild terroirs of each tiny unique parcel they farm. Amongst insanely steep rocky volcanic cliffs, you’ll find Envínate’s tiny parcels of organic vineyards highlighting ANCIENT vines, high elevation (3,000 feet?), Atlantic influence, hand harvests, and foot stomps. A recipe for delicious wine. Who would have known that this concentration of own-rooted centenarian vines would lie further south than Jacksonville, Houston, and New Orleans? Wine growing has come full circle where the new farming styles are actually the old farming styles.

🧑🏽‍🔬 Winemaking: foot-trodden in open top plastic tubs, fermented spontaneously with wild yeasts, with 40% whole clusters included, and raised in old barrels for 11 months with no racking and no SO2 added until bottling

Want to know more? Visit Jose Pastor Selections