Pancaliente

The NV Pancaliente is a new non-vintage sweet white produced with Albillo Real grapes that blends wines from 2017 to 2021. The grapes are dehydrated for six weeks (literally a vin de paille) and then destemmed and put to ferment in tinaja with indigenous yeasts until it stops fermenting. The wine is kept in tinaja (that is topped up) until it's bottled. It has 15% alcohol (not fortified) and 130 grams of residual sugar. This first bottling is from September 2022. It has a dark amber/mahogany color and an expressive nose of nuts, orange peel and dried apricots; it's very clean. The palate is sweet but without being cloying, keeping the freshness. This is quite unique and should live eternally in bottle. Delicious, complex and really surprising, it really reminded me of a vin de paille from Jura. There were 1,200 half-liter bottles produced.