Paso Las Manas, Rioja, 2021

This is the wine that seems to have seen the most progress year to year. We loved the 2020 but feel that the 2021 edges it. The best vintage to date, in our view. Fuller and more open somehow than the Finca, Paso offers stylish notes of wild flower, heather and plum, with a firm cool mineral spice. With a little time in the glass it positively glows! Superb. A single vineyard on rocky, clay soils planted up in the mountains at 720m altitude; the highest vineyard in the range. The site comprises a combination of vines planted in 1990 and others, in fact the majority, planted as recently as 2013, single staked to anchor the vines against the wind. Proof that stellar terroir can trump vine age. Aged entirely in large 3500L oak vat for a year.