2017 Fedellos do Couto Bastarda
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Tasting notes
Light, shimmering garnet. A vibrant, mineral-and spice-accented bouquet evokes fresh red currant, pomegranate and cherry, and floral and succulent herb notes build in the glass. Silky and racy in style, showing fine definition and spicy lift to the red fruit, blood orange and floral pastille flavors, which slowly spread out through the midpalate. Finishes impressively long and precise, with echoing mineral and floral notes. This wine in absolutely no way behaves like it came from a hot or even warm vintage.
Critic scores
Luis Gutiérrez, Wine Advocate
Josh Raynolds
More reviews and scores
The 2017 Bastarda contains some 15% Brancellao and Caíño, as they had a terrible frost and lost a lot of grapes, so they had to make up for it with other varieties. The wine fermented with full clusters and matured in used 300- and 500-liter French oak barrels for seven months. It's possibly the wine that has suffered more from the bottling, and it feels a bit shy and dizzy. It's a finicky grape, delicate and ethereal, quite closed and little compressed the day I tasted it. I also wonder if the percentage of the other grapes somehow changed the wine, which feels different from the 2016. In isolation, it would be very good, but it suffers in the side-to-side comparison with the 2016. The palate is more austere, with more tannins, a little in the style of Lomba dos Ares from this year. It made me hesitate a bit, and I tasted from two bottles. 5,000 bottles were filled in June 2018.