A sparkling new year with the Ancestral Method
Tonight at midnight all over Spain the bells that ring in the new year will almost be drowned out by the sound of corks popping, bubbles fizzing and even perhaps the odd choke and splutter.
Despite what has been a challenging year for everyone, households will still gather round to celebrate La Nochevieja — the old night — in the traditional way, with a little bowl of green grapes and a glass of sparkling wine.
Las doce uvas de la suerte, the twelve lucky grapes, will be cheerfully swallowed with barely a chomp, one on the stroke of each chime of midnight — no mean feat if you’re to see out the old year without gasping in the new one blue-faced and with cheeks stuffed with pulpy mush.
A gulp of wine brings welcome relief and feeds the inevitable giggles as sweet turrón and cheek kisses are gleefully shared.
Traditionally, at least since the 1880s, the libation of choice is Cava, a sparkling concoction of white Macabeo, Parellada and Xarel-lo grapes crafted in Catalonia. Whilst no longer permitted to be marketed as ‘Spanish champagne’ it is made using exactly the same traditional method as its more famous (and brand protected) French counterpart.
This year though, I’m stepping even further back into the past to toll in the change of calendar with a prized bottle of Rufete Ancestral 2018, an espumoso rosé from Bodegas Dominio De La Sierra, set in the pretty mountainside vineyard village of San Esteban in the Sierra de Francia, an hour south of Salamanca.
As the name suggests, this delicate artisan wine derives from autochthonous Rufete grapes — a medieval thin-skinned varietal I liken to Pinot Noir — using the ancestral method, by far the oldest known method of sparkling wine production, preceding the traditional method by 200 years.
High skill — low production
Unlike the process used to produce other types of champán, the ancestral method requires no disgorging of lees or dosage of added sugar at the point of bottling the fermented base wine in other to stimulate second fermentation. Instead, the wine is bottled before the alcoholic fermentation has finished and the bubble-inducing carbon dioxide is produced totally naturally by the still fermenting yeasts before the malolactic fermentation has taken place.
However, great skill is required to control this 500-year-old natural process and the method yields extremely low quantities.
The result is highly aromatic, lower alcohol, high quality sparkling wine made in very small quantities by organic farming methods. Optimum maturation is achieved between 1 and 3 years after bottling, and this is when it is perfect to drink given it will not develop with further storage.
It was my good fortune to enjoy this same vintage this time last year too — having secured two of only 365 bottles produced — so it is interesting to note the evolution of a very subtle and classic, creamy wine with its dainty fizz and floral notes.
To produce this exceedingly low number of bottles released to market, Bodegas Dominio hand-picked 2,000kg of Rufete from their own terraced vineyard, reduced the crop with a second selection in the winery and then trampled the best grapes underfoot without the use of a press, a process which achieved scarcely a 50% yield. The fermentation was initiated with indigenous wild yeast from the grapes and the wine was matured on its lees in bottle for fully twelve months, before filtration necessarily sacrificed even more of the precious produce.
With such low output, complex production, high costs and reliance on manual labour in challenging terrain, it is little wonder that demand is difficult to meet, and aficionados of this epicurean treat place their orders at the bodega up to a year in advance.
Not everyone will be lucky enough to toast this new year with a chilled bottle of Rufete Ancestral, but be assured that in so doing I will be wishing everyone a much more sparkling 2021, and looking forward to the opportunity of welcoming new friends and wine travellers to visit personally the little-known vines and bodegas of authentic Spain.
¡Salud y Feliz Año!
