Description
Wine Details
Alcohol Grade: 12.5%
Aging/ Vinification: Cretaceous limestone clay-calcareous soils above older sandstones and marls from the continental Tertiary period. Biodynamic farming. Estate vines. Traditional goblet trained old bush-vines interplanted with the Tempranillo. 50-100 years old. Farmed and harvested by hand (into small 15kg crates to prevent premature crushing). Aged six months on the lees, 90% in stainless and 10% in used French oak barriques.
Best to have it: 8-10 C
Size: 750 ml
The Winery: Sierra de Toloño
The project of young winemaker Sandra Bravo, Sierra de Toloño is based around a set of tiny plots of old vineyards at altitudes of up to 700m surrounding her small winery in Villabuena de Alava in Rioja Alavesa. Bravo’s winemaking choices are very much in service to the exquisite, organically farmed fruit she harvests from those plots.
Sandra Bravo, the vigneronne behind Sierra de Toloño, is recognized as one of the world’s top young winemakers. In just eleven years, she has achieved acclaim in Rioja, culminating in her inclusion in Tim Atkins’ First Growth Group in his annual Rioja Special Report. Her wines stand out for their unique style: parcellary, delicate, and tensile; site-specific, old-vine, and high elevation; and cellared gently with old French oak and amphorae, avoiding long oxidative aging. These elements offer a distinctive perspective on Rioja wines.
Growing up in Rioja surrounded by wine, it made sense for Bravo to study enology at the University of La Rioja, then transferring to the enology program at Toulouse in France. She followed on with work in Bordeaux, Chianti, Marlborough, California, and finally in Priorat for seven of her most formative years where she met her friend Ricard Rofes (now in charge of Scala Dei) who increased her inspiration and devotion to old-vine Spanish revivalism. It was then she was finally inspired to return to her home Rioja to craft terroir wines of a similar, Burgundian, traditionalist ilk.
Sandra was able to purchase some of the oldest and highest elevation micro-plots on the Alavesa side of the Ebro, the smallest of Rioja’s three sub-zones. This chillier, bucolic area is the perfect terroir for Sandra’s style, being the northernmost part of Rioja most exposed to the Atlantic Ocean’s cooling influence.
