Mas Del Serral 2009 (105/849)

LOOP LINE TASTING NOTES | Mas del Serral is where the past and future meet; offering something lasting in the future but also working on it with the ways of yesteryear.  

The most refined Spanish sparkling wine I have ever tasted. Despite having been aged for 17 months in vat and 100 months in bottle, the wine shows pristine fruit, intriguing stone aromas, zesty freshness. It offers a most delicate texture, with multi-layer flavours, lingering for a long time on the palate. From an old-vine single vineyard, co-planted with Xarel.lo and Bastard Negre (local biotype of Graciano). A top biodynamic terroir wine and a great artist's masterwork.

There is no 2008 vintage of this sparkling white so we tasted the 2009 Mas del Serral the second vintage ever produced. It's from a very low-yielding year that only produced 1800 kilos of grapes from 1.9 hectares of very old vines. This matured with the lees in bottle for no less than 100 months. The signature of this wine is the marine soils where the vines are planted and they provide very tasty wines with a saline mineral and marine personality. The wine is from an extreme year yet manages to keeps its poise and it comes through as fresh and balanced and has a long-lasting finish. This has a special sense of harmony and subtleness but there's also power and inner strength. This is one of the greatest sparkling wines produced in Spain and it comes from a superb terroir that produces wines that age very slowly as it's fresher and younger than many wines that are three or four years older. Because there was so little wine they decided to bottle it all in magnums and there are only 849 magnums. The price given is for a magnum.

I met winemaker Pepe Raventós at a dinner for artisan Spanish winemakers at Noble Rot that preceded the Viñateros tasting this past February. We never met during my short tenure as reviewer however it was his wines alongside those of Gramona that blew apart my preconceptions of what Cava can achieve. 

MADE BY | PEPE RAVENTÓS

REGION | CATALONIA, SPAIN

GRAPES | XAREL-LO & BASTARD NEGRE

SIZE | 750ML

ALC. BY VOL. | 12.5%