Cigales-Bierzo-Toro
Posted by Theo Heselmans on August 3rd, 2007
A friend of mine has an interesting site about wines: wijnkennis.be (sorry, only in Dutch). He regularly holds wine-tasting evenings, with wines sent to him from the winemakers themselves, or from local importers.
Yesterday was one of them, with an exiting theme: Spanish wines, from 3 different DO's in the Castilla y Léon region: Cigales, Toro and Bierzo.
The first two use Tempranillo predominantly. Bierzo uses a grape varietal called Mencia (slightly resembling Cabernet Franc).
We tasted around 30 wines last night (blind, no peeking at the label), and the average quality was rather high (we seldom give high grades), and a few of them were exceptionally good.
For me the most remarkable were:
- a Cigales (Viña Concejo, Crianza from Bodegas Pilcar)
- a Toro (Cyan, Vendima Seleccionada, Reserva, from Bodegas Garanza)
Strange that both of the wines I liked a lot, I recently bought at a local wine-vendor, specialized in Spain (Delphico).
This proves to me, that my taste is at least consistent,
and that I prefer strong, spicy (Syrah-like) full-bodied reds :-)
Complete list of tasted wines (updated, now includes overall scores): Cigales_Bierzo_Toro.xls
Category: Wine | 
Technorati: Wine
Comments (2)
Cool, thanks, I'll try and find them to try, shouldn't be too hard to find here in Spain! ;-)
BTW, not sure where you got the labels for the wines from, but are you aware of this label search? { Link }
No idea if it is actually any good, but looks interesting!
@Simon,
Very nice tip. I tried a couple of searches, and they had some of them. I'll try to use it in the future.