Just after the New Year, I decided to make 2010 ‘The Year of Mourvèdre‘ for VINEgeek and pledged to institute Mourvèdre Mondays. For this, the first installment, I didn’t want to begin with a top-dog wine (Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape, for example), mostly because I didn’t want the rest of the year to seem like a letdown. I want to ease into this thing. We’ve got 50 weeks to go, dear readers. So I decided to go with an affordable bottle from Spain, where Mourvèdre (or Monastrell as they call it) originated. And fittingly for the first installment, we start with a winery whose “major ambition is to reveal the great potential of wines made with 100% Monastrell.”

Producer: Señorio de Barahonda

Grapes: 100% Monastrell

Appellation: Yecla (DO, Spain). 85% of the grapes grown in this region are Monastrell, according to the Oxford Companion to Wine (2006).

Vineyards: Barahonda owns 840 acres of vineyards in Yecla, with 500 planted to Monastrell. The age of the vines range from 15-120 years. The soils are composed of limestone and chalk topsoil with clay and gravel subsoil.

Winemaking: No oak treatment. (They do a version called Barahonda Barrica which sees time in oak and gets some Cab blended in.)

Alcohol: 15%

Price: I paid $13 at Central Market, but I see it online for $10.

My tasting notes: Rich blackberry jam and earth notes on the nose. More blackberry and maybe cherry flavors on the palate with a sort of meaty, roasted fruit quality. It’s somewhat soft-textured in the mid-palate, but not flabby. There’s a nice little prickle of minerality and acidity at the end. It finishes with a bit of tannic grip and some definite heat from the 15% abv.

Overall impression: A solid start to Mourvèdre Mondays. Tasty dark fruit with some character. If you can get it for around $10, that’s a good value. B-

Free association:

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drwhimsy/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

More info:

Other reviews at CellarTracker.

Some nice photos from the Barahonda website: