Alvaro Palacios Priorat Les Aubaguetes 2017 750ml

Very smoky, showing crushed slate and hot stones. Very ripe fruit with blueberry and blackberry character. Full body. Very deep and profound with a solid cylinder of tannins that go deep and draw you down to the core of the wine. Lots of blueberries at the finish. A solid and super structured red that needs years to show its true greatness. Consistently great. Try after 2022.

The newest single-vineyard bottling is already in its third vintage. The 2017 Les Aubaguetes was produced with the grapes from a steep 1.28-hectare coster plot of vines planted in the early years of the 20th century. It's a blend of 75% Garnacha, 23% Cariñena and 2% Garnacha Blanca and Macabeo. It had a long maceration of 49 days and an élevage of 16 months in different oak containers. The soils are very dark, and the grapes tend to ripen very late, resulting in a slow and proper ripeness. The grapes were very healthy and the bunches quite loose and produced a very pure, expressive and showy wine. They picked the grapes on October 15 and 16, extremely late for the conditions of the year. This is very open and expressive and feels like the most exuberant of all the wines from 2017. There is ripeness and concentration, which is not surprising when you realize they only got 12.6 hectoliters per hectare, extremely low yields. Despite the high-ish percentage of Cariñena, you can hardly feel it, and the Garnacha seems to dominate the character of the wine. 2,200 bottles were filled in May 2019.