2023 Descendientes de José Palacios La Faraona Bierzo

(100 Points) The excitement of tasting a new vintage of La Faraona is hard to describe. The young, mysterious and insinuating 2023 La Faraona reveals an incredible nose of roses, violets, wild berries and herbs, curry and white pepper and an herbal twist of freshness, with incipient complexity and outstanding elegance. It's their highest altitude vineyard, planted with 83-year-old Mencía and 2% white grapes. The rain from the second week of September didn't do it any good, because it was still far from being harvested. It required a lot of manual work to keep all the bunches separate, never touching the ground, cleaning the vines manually one by one. It fermented with some full clusters in oak vats (they did close to five separate fermentations, because of the challenges with the harvest), and what made it to the blend matured in a 1,600-liter foudre for 11.8 months, longer than its siblings, and therefore was only bottled a few days before I tasted it in bottle. The final parameters are 13% alcohol and a pH of 3.71, but the pH does not reflect the sensation of freshness in the wine. There is no oak to be found in the aromas, and the tannins are as elegant, fine-grained and ethereal as I've ever seen in this wine. They got a good crop, even though they did a green harvest. This is powerful and concentrated, with a lot of energy and terrific balance. It's more approachable than Al Chelo but not as much as Moncerbal. 2,220 bottles produced. It was bottled in May 2025.  Drink Date:  2026 – 2040, The Wine Advocate