Torres Pazo Torre Penelas Blanco Granito Albarino 2022
(Rias Baixas, Spain)

The Torres family, a wine company based in Penedès (Catalonia) with more than 150 years of history, never stops innovating in different parts of the world. One of its most ambitious projects is the one started in the Salnés Valley, in Rías Baixas (Galicia) in 2012 with winemaker Víctor Cortizo. Under the name of Pazo Torre Penelas, it focuses on the creation of unique wines, developed with the territory in mind. An ancestral recovery project that shows all its splendor with Pazo Torre Penelas Blanco Granito, the first wine vinified and aged in cave winepresses carved in granite rock.

Sourced from a six-hectare walled vineyard that is part of a manor house classified as a historical heritage site from the 14th or 15th century, Pazo Torre Penelas Blanco Granito is a wine made with a single variety of Albariño, marked by the influence of the Atlantic Sea and the Umia River. It is produced with traditional cultivation methods and once the grapes reach optimum ripening they are vinified in ovoid granite tanks (a predominant rock that is almost exclusive to the Rías Baixas D.O.) for 15 days at a temperature of 14ºC. The wine then remains in these same tanks for a period of 8 months on its own lees. There, thanks to the porosity of the granite, the wine undergoes constant micro-oxygenation, enhancing the aromas and providing minerality and salinity.  Finally, the wine rests for a further 8 months in stainless steel tanks before bottling.

Thus, once again, the old becomes the avant-garde. According to Miguel Torres Maczassek himself, from the fifth generation of the Torres family, Pazo Torre Penelas Blanco Granito is intended to be "a nod to that ancestral viticulture when stone and wine went hand in hand". And when you try it, you will discover that this has been more than achieved.