2004 Vina Gravonia Blanco Crianza

The 2004 Vina Gravonia Blanco is pure Viura from a vineyard named after the white wines from Graves in Bordeaux, which Don Rafael Lopez de Heredia y Landeta, founder of the winery, admired. It is aged for four years in used barrels, racked every six months and bottled after being fined with egg whites. 40,000 bottles were produced in the great 2004 vintage. It has a bright, shiny (almost fluorescent!) yellow color and a fresh nose of citric fruit (pink grapefruit), fennel, dried flowers, chamomile, beeswax and hints of mushrooms. The palate has superb acidity, which gives it incredible freshness with great delineation and purity of flavors finishing very dry with a mineral, almost saline note. It invites you to have another bottle! This wine is labeled Crianza, but the aging times (and the quality) greatly exceed the requirements for the category. It’s sold almost a decade after the vintage year, so I still consider it a real bargain. Delicious now, but it should age with style. Drink new-2024. Lopez de Heredia has a problem many wineries would like to have; they are selling their wines very fast, they don’t have enough stock to cover market demand and some of the wines are highly allocated. I’m not talking about their historical vintages here – which are also available on the price list – I’m only talking about the current releases. Everything is aggravated by the fact that some of the top wines are only produced in exceptional years: for example, the next Vina Tondonia Gran Reserva will be 1995 and won’t be released until 2015. For the white version of Tondonia Gran Reserva there is a gap between 1991, the last vintage sold, and 1996, the next one, so who knows when it will see the light! As a result, there are few wines to taste this year and we should be patient. All wines are produced from their own vineyards in Haro, each from a different plot that names the wine, produced and aged following the most orthodox traditional methods (visiting the winery is like time travelling to 100 years ago!) with no stainless steel or new oak to be found anywhere. In fact their vats and barriques are old, some of them very old. All their wines are aged for a long time before being released and keep their alcohol levels at around 12-12.5% with good acidity. They have tirelessly kept the traditional flame burning. At one point I heard Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia referring to them as “the last of the Mohicans.” That’s not the case anymore. The sad news is that Don Pedro Lopez de Heredia passed away in 2013. Born in 1928, he was the nephew of the Bodega’s founder and father of the current fourth generation in charge of the family winery, Maria Jose, Mercedes and Julio Cesar. Imported by Think Global, Santa Barbara, CA; www.thinkglobalwines.com