Blanc Fugitiu 2024 - Bodega Clandestina
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Blanc Fugitiu 2024 - Bodega Clandestina
Xarello · Spain · 75cl
Pickup available at 3 Cornmarket Street
Usually ready in 2-4 days
How to serveLightly chilled, 10 to 12°C. Treat it like a light orange wine; it opens over an hour in the glass.
A white wine with the subtle complexity of an orange, this shows the class of Xarello from these old vineyards, with lemon posset, wild thyme, orange blossom, and apricot. The tannins are delicate, with a palate of substance and vitality that is tethered by the time spent ageing in oak. Superb Xarello here.
Good with: hake with lemon butter, or roast chicken with thyme.
Xarello planted in 1970 in the Serral vineyard. The grapes were destemmed, with a portion submerged in the fermenting juice. The wine was then racked to steel until it completed malolactic fermentation, and was racked to 500-litre casks to age on the lees for three months.
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 old bush vines grow almost to the size of small trees. The red clay is littered with cervell de gat: limestone nodules that the locals call ‘cat brains’. Hot during the days, Ferran's selection of this site was due to its position in a wide valley on the hillside of the Alt Penedès, where cool air settles overnight helping to preserve acidity. Fugitiu means fugitive, a reference to Ferran’s existence outside of the DO's control.
Grapes: Xarello
Region: Sant Martí Sarroca, Alt Penedès, Catalunya, Spain
ABV: 11.5%