93+ points
"The Viñas Veijas bottling from Germán Blanco’s Quinta Milú truly comes from old vines,
as these two small parcels of tempranillo are both more than one hundred years of age! The plots are both smaller than thirty ares and are planted at an elevation of nine hundred and six meters on chalky-clay soils. Señor Blanco crushes the grapes by foot, ferments the wine with native yeasts in open-topped wooden casks and raises the wine for twelve months in used French oak barrels. The 2021 version comes in at fourteen percent octane and offers up a deep, youthful and sappy nose of sweet dark berries, black cherries, cigar smoke, a lovely base of soil and a touch of oak from the older casks. On the palate the wine is full-bodied, focused and very pure, with a beautiful core of old viney fruit, lovely soil inflection, ripe, buried tannins and a very, very long, poised and beautifully balanced finish. This is still a very young and primary wine and cellaring is needed to allow its secondary layers of complexity to emerge and its tannins to soften, but it is going to be stellar once it is ready to drink! 2033-2075."
View from the Cellar
Issue 105