2013 El Carretil

A wine that always feels more marked by the oak, the 2013 El Carretil showed abundant roasted notes, hints of coffee and dark chocolate, with empyreumatic sensations. This wine always had a lower pH and higher acidity, which according to López de Lacalle might be the reason why the wine is consistently more marked by the oak; I don't quite understand this, because my experience is that usually wines with higher pH and lower acidity tend to show more the effect of the oak. This will certainly require some more time in bottle, especially for the toasty notes to get integrated, because the palate does not show oak tannins, but rather the chalky austere tannins from the rather austere soils (with some 17% active limestone when the average is about 12-13%), which are whiter and quite shallow. It's also true that the wine matured in new barriques. ("I hate used barrels," Juan Carlos López de Lacalle told me. "And the problem is that we still don't get the quality of oak we want in larger barrels...") This is the oakier of all ten wines I tasted from Artadi. Will it integrate with time? I hope so, because the quality of the wine is super. There are some 4,000 bottles in 2013.