Compania Bodeguera de Valenciso Blanco 2017

Wine Advocate :
Rating 93+
Drink Date
2019 – 2027
Issue Date
29th Jun 2019
Source
243, The Wine Advocate

Despite the difficulties of the 2017 growing season, with frosts that decimated the crop and a warm and dry spring and summer, the 2017 Valenciso Blanco shows extremely well and stands up to the 2016 that I tasted next to it. It’s young and undeveloped, still very primary. The oak seems better integrated, and the wine doesn’t show any signs of excess. The alcohol and acidity are similar to the 2016, and so is the varietal breakdown—Viura with 30% Garnacha Blanca. It’s clean and elegant, in the house profile, not showy, a little shy but with more complexity and clout than might seem at first sight. This is a very pleasant surprise. 12,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in July 2018.

I’ve always liked and admired the wines from Valenciso; they seem to take the best from the traditional and more modern Rioja. To get up to speed, I tasted two vintages of their regular red and revisited the previous vintage of all three wines. To show how serious they are, they explained how they are not going to release the 2013, because “it was a year with lots of botrytis, and since we don’s use anti-botrytis products, we had a very short crop. We have doubts about the aging potential of the wine, so the same as the 2003, the 2013 will not be released”. As for some good news, they started converting their vineyards to organic farming in 2017 (bravo!), and they are working on a varietal Graciano and a concrete-aged red that should be released in 2020 if everything goes according to plan. One of the names that is undeservedly flying under the radar