Ancestral Confiscat 2022 - Bodega Clandestina
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Ancestral Confiscat 2022 - Bodega Clandestina
Xarello · Catalunya, Spain · 75cl
Pickup available at 3 Cornmarket Street
Usually ready in 2-4 days
A lambent haze in the glass, with the colour showing some signs of ageing in bottle. We get a bright, zesty minerality on the nose, followed by fleshy white fruits and biscuit crumb. The palate is substantial, with the acidity of Xarello keeping things fresh and flowing. Great as an aperitif or with food.
Good with: salt cod croquetas, or fried squid with aioli.
This cuvée is closest to Ferran's heart, it being bubbles from old vine Xarello made in the ancestral method, a wine that channels so much of Catalunya's wine tradition, past and present. The harvested bunches were pressed without destemming or vatting. A month after picking, the wine was bottled in September 2022 with 23.4 grams of sugar remaining. The wine fermented and aged in bottle, completing malolactic fermentation, and was disgorged in October 2025.
The producer
Ferran Lacruz works 8 hectares of vines around his hometown of Sant Martí Sarroca in the Alt Penedès. A graduate of the Escola Agrària de Viticultura i Enologia Mercè Rossell i Domènech, Ferran was moved to make wine in his hometown after years working in tourism, where he encountered first-hand, among his clients, the reputational damage that decades of heavy, intensive viticulture had inflicted on the region. Growing up in the Penedès with a winemaking uncle, Ferran knows the hills of the Alt Penedès like the back of his hand, so when it came to acquiring vines, he already knew where to look. He was exacting in his selection, picking sites not on the hillsides where one might expect, but in the valleys, where the diurnal range is greatest, allowing slower ripening and later harvests. His Xarel·lo comes from old vine stock planted in the '60s and '70s, trained as bush vines, growing to a remarkable size in the famous cervell de gat soils of the region. He has also planted Carignan Blanc, a variety that ripens late and keeps its acidity well. In the cellar, all of the wines see a certain amount of skin contact, extracting the phenolics inherent to Xarel·lo and lending his wines a delicate complexity that shows the class of the variety. Ferran's use of glass for the élevage of the lighter wines brings a roundness and balance, while old wood and amphorae are used in the ageing of the more extracted wines. The wines themselves are remarkably lucid, detailed with the typicity of their provenance and the fiery personality of their maker.
The place
These vines were planted in the late 60s in the La Creu plot, over 1.45 hectares, trained as bush vines. This particular parcel sits between 300 and 350 metres of elevation, and the soils are thin clay and limestone. The age of these vines and the thin soils they grow on mean they produce small quantities of rich and concentrated fruit per vine, picked a little earlier than other parcels by Ferran, bolstering the acidity of the resulting wine. For Ferran, this ancestral is his attempt to show that Penedès is more than just cava, and that when working with the old Xarello plantings of the Alt Penedès, this ancient method can produce top class sparkling wine.
Grapes: Xarello
Region: Sant Martí Sarroca, Alt Penedès, Catalunya, Spain
ABV: 10.5%