Parker om:
Rueda El Transistor Verdejo
There is a flinty and smoky twist in the 2022 El Transistor, a pure Verdejo from stony soils. It fermented with indigenous yeasts in barriques, foudres and concrete vats, where it matured after six or seven months. To keep the freshness, the whites from Rueda don't go through malolactic fermentation, and this kept a healthy level of acidity and pH (3.33), while the alcohol was 13%. This is rich without excess and fills your mouth, and it has the chalky texture from the limestone rich soils. Tasty. 13,902 bottles were filled in May 2023. 92/100Telmo Rodríguez and his partner Pablo Eguzkiza keep working in different regions, although still quite focused in Galicia, reducing the volumes for entry-level wines and going for more serious wines, moving away from generic varietal bottlings and going more for site-designated wines. I tasted the fine wine portfolio that has just been released, different vintages depending on the place, looking at the very small details of each. 2022 was a very warm year, and the wines from Rueda were saved by some rain in mid-September that slowed the ripening and achieved fresh wines. In Valdeorras, they have discontinued the Gaba do Xil red and replaced the white with a single-vineyard bottling from the O Barreiro lieu-dit, also reducing volumes. Here, they are releasing mostly 2020s, except for the younger white from 2022. They are both warm years with an early harvest that resulted in ripe wines, with the complication of lots of fungal diseases in 2020 that decimated the crop. In Galicia, the organic certification is complex when you have neighbors, so they are still in a transition moment. In Rioja, the current vintage is also (mostly) 2020, a challenging year with mildew, but they were lucky to escape the hail that didn't hit Lanciego but affected the vineyards in Labastida (Tabuérniga and Beatas were affected). The harvest was earlier than in 2019, but they still started the sixth of October with the terraces of Tabuérniga. Pablo Eguzkiza told me it was a strange year for Tempranillo, when Graciano ripened earlier than Tempranillo.
