La Santa de Ursula, Envinate 2021

Beautiful nose full of white pepper funk, grapefruit, wild raspberries, chalk and mineral. On the palate, this is ethereal and lively but super tense with a bit more verticality than the equally attractive, funky but linear Táganan. Textured, mineral and wild finish that develops in the finish. Goes on and on. Delicious and so drinkable now, but this can age, for a decade, too, if not more.

The La Santa de Úrsula bottling from Envínate is roughly a fifty-fifty blend of Listán Negro and Negramoll, with a couple of percent of Listán Blanco co-planted in the vineyard. The vines are more than one hundred years of age. A small percentage of the wine underwent carbonic maceration, with the rest fermented with about twenty-five percent whole clusters. The wine is aged in older Burgundy casks for eight months and bottled without fining or filtration. The 2021 La Santa offers up a deep and complex bouquet of dark berries, bitter cherry, tree bark, sweet botanicals, incipient notes of chipotle pepper, a fine base of soil and a topnote of orange peel. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, focused and beautifully pure at the core, with lovely transparency and grip, ripe, fine-grained tannins, tangy acids and outstanding balance on the long, complex and extremely classy finish. This is a stellar young wine. 2028-2065+.