4 Monos GR-10 Tinto

Here's where you find out just how ignorant I am.  This Spanish red has been on the shelf here for about a year with very little action on it because I frankly didn't know what it was.  Spanish red, I thinks.  That's all you need to know.  Spanish red.  So it's got to be good.  So I thinks.  

Svetlana writes her own orders so when I asked her to send me a couple cases of Spanish and Portuguese wines, more 4 Monos came in the door, which was fine since everything she sends me is good.  It just means I need to get off my butt and learn what the stuff is so I can sell it.

4 Monos is literally 4 Monkeys, the project of four winemakers who, while hiking the GR-10 trail from Lisbon to Valencia, found the vineyards for this wine around Madrid, the midpoint of the trek.  Being winemakers they recognized the worth of the high altitude granite soils of the Sierra de Gredos region within the Madrid DO and thus began their project.

This organic red is a blend of mostly Garnacha with Carenina and Syrah blended from vineyards up to eighty-five years old.  Those grapes are hand harvested and whole cluster pressed before fermenting with wild yeasts from the vineyard.  For aging, the wine sees nine months in oak with some time in foudres and concrete. (Foudres are larger oak vats commonly used in the Cotes du Rhone.)

The wine is a pale ruby color with floral aromatics of lilac and violets.  On the palate it shows fresh focused raspberry and cherry fruit with spice and soft tannins.  Being Spanish wine, its display is balanced and complex with typical Spanish earthiness and acidity.  Food affinities are wide open but definitely something with a meat sauce/gravy might be nice.

And there you have it...I thinks.