Ramblís Monastrell

Ramblís Monastrell is a wine which will make you reconsider your concept of Monastrell. So that will include most of the wines which Rafa Bernabé produces in his Viñedos Culturales collection. Rafa has a real commitment to his land, which he loves and respects enormously. All the wines in this series are made with minimum intervention, vinified with hardly any handling and in the most natural way possible, without the addition of sulphur and with yeasts from the actual vineyard. Ramblís is a fine example of this, a pure Monastrell, a complex wine with an elegant, clearly defined bouquet.

Ramblís is also a different Monastrell. It offers a rendering of this grape that we're not very used to: light, open, fresh, with lots of red fruit, very easy to drink, and one where the terroir definitely plays the leading role. This leaves in second, if not third or fourth place, the variety's usual vegetal notes, which have metamorphosed here into grey-hued hints: subtle suggestions of ashes which bring to mind certain Canary wines, dry notes, a mixture of Mediterranean plants and Asian spices.

Ramblís is a wine of the land and countryside. It has a rather rustic personality, particularly due to its whiffs of clay and that touch of dryness on the nose, but it's also very refined and most appealing, rich in aromas of red fruits like cherries and redcurrants, with some juicy hints of ripe pears, dry firewood, and candy-sweet sensations; it combines Mediterranean warmth with a tremendous freshness on the palate. It's juicy, with a powerful entry, plenty of volume and ripe tannins, but it also has two very distinctive traits: an unusual liveliness on the palate, like a slight carbonic effect, almost imperceptible after it spends time in bottle or if we decant it, yet it means the wine feels particularly light on the palate (this feature is more common when it's been recently bottled and is due to production methods, since some of the grapes ferment without being destalked), and too a saline touch. In short, a serious and profound wine with plenty of character, polished and elegant; a wine of contrasts, a twilight wine covering that time between day and night, juicy and dry, lovely and refreshing.

NOTE: We recommend decanting the wine an hour before serving.