The new Pago de Carraovejas is here

The Ruiz Aragoneses Family launches another vintage of the wine to which many aspire and which gives so many smiles to those who open it with their eyes closed knowing that they are getting the guarantee of a wine that does not fail.

Its new "best" vintage

After a very extreme 2017 vintage, 2018 gave the vineyard the chance to find its feet again and regulate itself, with cold and water at the beginning of a cycle that it needed more than ever. These conditions turned into vigour and a load of fruit and gave way to a warm summer that facilitated natural balance and led to a healthy year and an excellent vintage.

We are talking about its new "best"vintage, because the winery has been on an upward path in all senses for a few years now, but above all it feels comfortable in its quest for more and more identity, getting to know the singularities of its estates better and making wines with more personality. A process in which many are moving away from the identity of their area and where Carraovejas has found a niche that seemed impossible to find.

A wine in which you can find the three varieties grown in the estate: tinta fina (93%), cabernet sauvignon (4%) and merlot (3%). For some this information will be a story a thousand times told, for others it will be a drama. For those of us who have been lucky enough to taste different vintages from different decades of the winery, it may be the key to its balance and its transcendence, and undoubtedly the confirmation of the honesty and openness of its project and its wines.

The secret weapons of Pago de Carraovejas

For the more suspicious, a visit is the best way to understand it. For me, there are three key factors that make Alma de Carraovejas (the umbrella under which the family's different wine projects are framed) a seamless project beyond commercial achievements.

Few top sellers like them, leaders in their area in international prestige, are as scrupulous in knowing every inch of their estate. Pedro Ruiz never ceases in his attempts to investigate, to delve deeper, to better understand the environment of the family estate, its singularities, the differences between its plots, from a point of view that goes beyond the vineyard itself.

The importance of the team. The winery employs more than 70 people dedicated to making a special estate into a special wine, specialists in every field from the vineyard to the barrels, as well as a team in the laboratory to autonomously control all the processes on the way from the grape to the bottle.

The technical. It is the support that allows this whole idea to be articulated. Gravity-based winemaking systems, their own yeasts and bacteria (thanks to their own R+D study), and a degree of self-demandingness that means not limiting themselves in the search for innovative solutions. Avant-garde at the service of tradition.

The other side of Alma Carraovejas... or the other colour...

This process of searching, of looking to the land and of continuing to understand quality wine as something in constant evolution, led Pedro Ruiz and his team a few years ago to consider questions beyond their reds and their comfort zone. The unreserved commitment to the Segovian Verdejo of Ossian Vides y Vinos, was just the prelude to what we are now experiencing, accurate and committed extensions of the Alma Carraovejas project hundreds of kilometres away from the deep roots settled in Peñafiel.

Many of you know Pago de Carraovejas. But perhaps many of you have not yet had the opportunity to get to know the other side of the project, or rather the other colour. In a very short time the family has become a benchmark in Spanish white wines thanks to two places, two stories, without which it would be difficult to make great wines.

In 2013, the Ruiz Aragoneses family disembarked in Ossian Vinos y Viñedos as heirs to the pre-phylloxera Verdejo grapevines of Segovia. They began a journey that seven years later has become one of the projects on which the Verdejo grape rebuilds its identity and its stripes. The unique sandy soils, which have protected the roots from the dreaded phylloxera, and a very extreme climate, with large fluctuations, give the vineyard a unique character. Quintaluna de Ossian, the winery's youngest wine, explains its identity in every sip. Ossian and Capitel de Ossian (big words) are the reference in the Verdejo conceptualised as a white wine capable of going beyond.

Just a year ago the team's arrival in Galicia was confirmed, to relaunch one of the areas with the most history behind it in the Galician vineyard, Ribeiro. Viña Mein and Emilio Rojo in the Avia Valley, in the province of Ourense, are two of the projects that have the most to contribute to the area and export the most pleasure from it. The cradle of Ribeiro, if you still do not know them, you can leave the mail halfway and go to buy them.

And for those of you who have stayed until the end, as in the post-credits scenes of the Marvel saga films, here's a teaser. In addition to the fantastic new vintages, their projects in Galicia and Ribera (there is one more surprise, also in Ribera), soon the Alma Carraovejas team will surprise us with the marketing of other great projects within the world of fine wine beyond our borders, collaborating with other top producers from some of the most important wine regions in the world. Remember the name Singular Vineyards Wines (SVWines).

Keep posted!