2015 Termanthia

The 2015 Termanthia is a selection from 120-year-old ungrafted Tinta de Toro vines from six plots that fermented in French oak vats with commercial yeasts and matured in barrels for 22 months; this vintage is when they started using less new oak. It has 15% alcohol and a pH of 3.67. Tasting this next to the 2016, it feels like there's more toasty oak here, and it's very balsamic with notes of camphor and a little minty, a little heady and quite ripe with black rather than red fruit, abundant tannins and plenty of oak-related flavors. 10,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in June 2017 and launched in 2022.

Aged for 20 months in new French barriques. Bottled May 2017. Big, powerful (but not at all brutish) wine. After five years in the cellars, still very youthful with a great deal of finesse. Violets, rose petals, touch of herb. Acidity is more evident – this will benefit from several more years in bottle but the freshness combines beautifully with concentrated fruit, aromatics and subtle oak. (AWH)

Full bottle 1,954 g. 100% Tinta de Toro. This, their top cuvée, is made from just four to six parcels of their oldest and best vineyard parcels – always at least over 100 years old, but mostly from vines well over 120 years old. All bush vines, dry-farmed and organically cultivated (if their vineyards and their growers' vineyards are not organically certified, they are in the process of being certified). They work with more than 30 parcels that are over 100 years old, so every year they have a chance to select the best for each vintage. They have a team of 40+ people who destem berry by berry and then the grapes are foot-pressed and fermented parcel by parcel. They age only in new oak and for this and previous vintages the wine went into small new French oak barrels for malo and then was racked into new French oak barrels again (200% new oak, in wine speak) for two years. Followed by five years in bottle in the cellar. 2015 was a dry year, relatively hot. Technical director Jésus Jiménez tells me that the most important thing about this wine is the serving temperature – cooler than you would expect, around 15 °C. I completely agree with the advice from Jiménez about serving temperature, even though it surprised me. I'd thought, tasting this very big, oak-driven, rich, alcoholic wine, that what it needed was decanting. After our Zoom tasting, I put all three Numanthia reds in the fridge (the door nearly collapsed with the weight of them…) and then retasted them. I guess I've got stuck in the 'light red = can be chilled' story. These colossal reds, with their heady mass of alcohol, tannins and fruit, once cool, tamed down from aggressive roar to purr. The concentration of the Termanthia 2015 was almost crushing until it spent a half hour in the fridge. The tannins – broad, leather-strapped, high-booted, bold and snaking whips – once cool, pulled their roadshow and allowed the fruit to come forward and tell its own story. Not nearly as fragrant and elegant as the Numanthia 2017 (which is why I'm looking forward to future vintages of Termanthia, which, I'm told, are much more about freshness and purity than about the winemaking regime that has defined them up until this point), but this is a formidably intense, powerful, chewy, impressive wine. Dried damsons, dried blood, iodine, red dust and wild thyme but there is also a sappiness to the fruit and tannins, drawing me to lean into the wine rather than away from it. There is a thrum of life in the deeply fissured dry-ancient-tree-bark feel of the finish. Not an easy wine, but it holds great beauty and will age magnificently. (TC)