MicroBio Wines, "La Banda Del Argilico" 2021

A fun thruline from the past wine shares has been the mysterious popping up of fruit from ‘El Mago de Los Verdejos’ (The Wizard of Verdejo) Ismael Gozalo in wines both his and not-his. For instance, the Alsatian project ‘Sons of Wine’ had a pét-nat crafted from Verdejo fruit purchased from Ismael; we have also carried the slightly more rarely seen estate rosado from Ismael’s MicroBio project. Crafted from Tempranillo vines farmed outside of the city of Segovia in Northwest Spain’s Castilla y Léon region, the wine is an outlier in Ismael’s range/reputation. The story here is primarily Verdejo, having for two decades now cultivated some of the greatest white wines in Spain, and absolutely some of the best Verdejo in the world. He works primarily with super old-vine (ungrafted, un-treated, pre-phylloxera (200+ year-old)) plantings of the grape rooted in the typically sandy soils (the sand enabled these vines to avoid phylloxera as the infamous louse cannot stomach sand) of the area slightly northwest of Segovia known as ‘Rueda.’ In this micro-region, Ismael operates out of his hometown of Nieva (tr.: snow(s)) where he has a labyrinthine cellar replete with amphorae, glass demijohn, barrel, tank etc. Wines bubbling with future-past! Maybe more than anything else, the wines of MicroBio always bear a clear point of view, a kind of bristling contradiction: they are eager to show their precision. Eager/precise: nearly as rare as the magic touch of El Mago.

100% Verdejo from centenarian vines rooted in a particular type of mineral-rich clay soil called Argilico. The grapes are direct pressed and fermented with wild yeasts, followed by 8 months of aging on the lees. Unfined, unfiltered, no SO2.