Appellation: none
Cuvée: Porco Bravo
Colour: White
Grapes: Albariño
About: The label depicts a wild pig happily drinking a glass of wine with a bunch of grapes and is dominated by the colour orange in reference to the orange wine-making. It’s a cheeky wine in that it shouldn’t work, 8 months whole bunch maceration of Albariño! But it does and the wild pig came to mind.
Vines
Location: from a plot near the cellar
Size: < 1 ha
Age: planted in 1970’s
Soils: granite
Exposition: north facing
Altitude: between 20-40m
Training: all the vines are planted on pergola trellising lifting it off the floor to avoid damp and to increase ventilation.
Farming philosophy: basically organic, with natural treatments, as little as possible conventional organic (sulfur, copper).
Average yield hl/ha: 45
Climate: humid, Atlantic, but benefitting from sea breezes, cool but increasingly warm in winter and hot in summer.
Winemaking
The harvest is carried out into small buckets of 10 to 15 litres and then transported within 30 minutes to an hour to the cellar, there’s no analysis of the grapes just tasting and looking at the juice. The fruit is left whole, crushed and put into amphora to ferment, and it’s left there to macerate until bottling 8 or 9 months later. There is nothing added or taken, no sulfites at any stage. The malo happens naturally. The wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered, usually in a small window of opportunity in the summer when the wine has fallen clear.
Vintage Notes 2021
Another difficult up and down year. A wet warm winter, which didn’t allow the sap to rest sufficiently, was followed by a wet spring with up and down temperatures that favoured mildew. There followed a hot and dry June, a moderate July, then a hot and dry August that ended with significant rains at the end and into September.
Date bottled: 2022-06
Bottles produced: 1200
Alcohol %: 12
SO2 Total: < 20
Tasting: 2022-07-28 complex and great fun at same time, aromas of carrot, ginger, lemon, orange, white pepper. Medium body. Textured, vital, refreshing, intense, great energy. Took this bottle home and it was still great 2 weeks later.