2003 Agrícola Falset-Marça Montsant Falset Old Vines Spain. $19.99 at Beekmans, Glen Rock. Imported by Oleimports, New Rochelle, NY.
Deep red color, medium hue, quite bright, subtle aromas of fruit, spice, earth, cedar, perhaps a bit of menthol, good fruit flavors with earth, cedar and spice, medium mouth feel, well evolved tannins, long finish with a number of grace notes, especially fruit, earth and cedar. A really lovely wine. No EGA. 4*.
An excellent match with slow braised short ribs, new roasted potatoes and home grown carrots [which suffered this year from too much rain in my clayey soils, but showed some flavor with the wine.]
Notes:
Beekman: Certain wines make you step back and say, “Wow!” This is one of them. From the hills of Montsant, Spain, which is very close to Priorat, this big, delicious blend of 85% Garnacha (Grenache) and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon is fabulous and a real value. The grapes were grown on a vineyard with an 11% slope, which is difficult for the workers, but great for the quality of the wine. The excellent drainage and very poor soil ensures low yields. Jordi Alonso was the winemaker for this 1200-case cuvée.
Winery: http://www.falsetmarca.com/
Distributor: http://www.oleimports.com/wines/falset.htm
Tanzer: Inky ruby. Deep, powerful and exotic on the nose, with intense cola, licorice, cherry liqueur and oak spice aromas; this smells like a serious, big-bucks wine. Suave, silky and lush, the cherry and dark berry flavors showing great intensity and sweetness and given focus and support by fine-grained tannins. Pliant and sweet through the strikingly pure, bright, long finish. A superb bargain. -Josh Raynolds
VS: The geographically diverse Tarragona DO is divided into three sub-zones. The best one by a mile is Falset, which is red wine country. It borders the Priorat DO (Falset is but six miles from Gratallops, where some of the greatest Priorat wineries are -- Alvaro Palacios, Clos Mogador, Clos Erasmus). It only lacks the fabled deep slate soil of Priorat, but has some poor rocky soil and precipitous slopes of its own. This is where the Capçanes and Falset co-ops, and private wineries like Josep Anguera Beyme and Capafons Ossó are (plus upcoming estates bought and planted by Eric Solomon and by Chris Cannan). It's hugely promising. The new edition of the OUO shows more interest in the area than prior British works: things change too fast in Spain for the old Anglo-Saxon gurus to keep abreast of what's new. [Victor's entry in Robinson's OCW3 is similar; this quote comes from his response to an earlier post on a Falset wine.]
OCW3: DO created in Cataluña in 2001 which used to be known as the Falset subregion of the Tarragona DO. Its 2,000 ha/4,950 acres of vineyards were given their own identity in order to highlight its superior quality. It largely lacks the schist soils of its neighbour Priorat but otherwise its old Garnacha and Cariñena vineyards on steep slopes enable it to produce wines of very similar style and quality.