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| We received our Envínate allocations in early December and have been waiting out the holidays to conduct a proper tasting of them, away from the blooming, buzzing confusion. Tonight is the first opportunity to present them to you, and if your liver is not feeling too tender after all the abuse you threw at it between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I strongly urge you to stop by, as the wines are (a) delightful; (b) in short supply, and (c) you need to taste these wines. I first tasted the Roberto Santana’s wines several years ago on a warm Spring afternoon during a rare sit-down luncheon tasting of the wines at Lukshon in Culver City—this is a superior way to taste and consider wines, and I will be the first to admit that the standard trade tasting format truly sucks, as you wish for a third hand to hold your notepad, the other hands occupied with your wineglass and pen while you jostle through a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes of other wine buyers, just as determined as you are to taste and be done with it. We tasted several wines that day, but it was Roberto’s old vines listán blanco that completely floored me, made from a grape that I had previously dismissed as the serviceable if bland grape mostly used to make Sherry. I learned on that day just how wrong I was, and if you spend any time in the wine trade you can have these object lessons on a regular basis. If you are not an asshole, your takeaway might be to try to be more open to wine and the world, to not prematurely pigeonhole products that prove to be preternaturally perfect. Old vines, beautiful, sensitive farming, wild yeast fermentation with no crap added in old barrels—if there has a formula behind what Envínate is about, that is it. Roberto Santana, Alfonso Torrente, Laura Ramos, and José Martínez met fifteen years ago when they were enology students in Alicante. They decided to join in a collaborative project to make wine together in their respective regions, and thus the Envínate project was born. Tonight, we are tasting three wines from Roberto’s Tenerife vineyards, and one from the mainland. We are starting with an old vines, self-rooted listán blanco, some of which gets a bit of maceration; a portion of the wine ages in neutral concrete, while the other part ages in old barrels. No futzing with the wine as it ages; it just sits and rests until bottling, with zero sulfites added at any point.
Envínate “Benje” Blanco Tenerife 2018 |