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Love natural wine or just dipping your toes into this category? You are not alone. A winemaking philosophy originating from France that's enthusiastically embraced by the Spaniards, Spain is today leading the charge with many intriguing and delicious natural wines coming out of the country. A trip down drinking holes in Barcelona will tell you that natural wine is no longer a fad but a conscious choice for many consumers.
The Spanish natural wine conversation would be incomplete without mentioning Laureano Serres. A computer programmer in Madrid previously, Laureano moved back home to Tarragona to first head the local winemaking cooperative before making his own Mendall wine in 1999. He had always worked with organically grown grapes but his foray into natural wine happened in the most unlikely manner. Meticulousness ought to be second nature to a trained engineer, but his first steps into natural wine was the result of forgetting to add sulphur to the batch of wines he was making in 2002. Nonetheless, he liked what he made and from then on never looked back.
Laureano is a strong proponent for natural wine and a firm believer of minimal intervention winemaking. His Mendall wines are clean cut with beautiful fruit notes and a sense of place and time, without that cookie cutter feel that many conventional wines give year after year. Yet importantly, the wines are fundamentally very enjoyable wines, not diluted alcoholic fruit juices. My main beef with the fast-exploding natural wine scene in the last few years has been that a lot of new (and dare I say untrained) winemakers had jumped onboard the bandwagon with gusto but little foundation in winemaking, resulting in every possible interpretation of natural wine, except the one that really mattered the most, Taste. There were some natural wines I have had that either were too short on winemaking so they tasted more like fruit juices or overly long such that all fruit flavours were killed; or simply bore technical faults like mousiness in the palate. Yet, in all these cases, the winery or importer would tell me that that’s how natural wines are.
The 5 Mendall labels that are currently available on Wines Online are wonderful examples of good natural wine. Laureano releases his wines in small cuvees a few times a year based on what’s ready so each release could be different from the last.
Being in the Tarragona area, the reds are predominantly Grenache and Carignan. The red and black fruit profiles for these reds are amazing and the fruit profiles are very comparable to what a conventional red wine from the region would taste like, even though the alcohol percentages are a nearly 1.5-2% off the usual. It’s remarkable that this could be achieved without any additives to the wines.
The whites are made from Macabeo, with the current releases coming from the older Abeurador site and the younger La Plana vineyard. The difference in the vine age is telling on the final products, but both are equally enjoyable.
For natural wine enthusiasts, Brutal is the holy grail. Brutal is a style of natural wine made on the zero/zero principle. 0/0 refers to no additives (including sulfites, sugars and acids) and no reductives (fining and filtering). The idea for Brutal is to show a wine at its most natural state, without manipulating the taste profile through external means. Laureano with 3 other winemakers were the guys who started the Brutal wine movement. The Brutal wine label you see on the bottle is conferred by the original quartet to other winemakers who share the same vision and make good wine. These winemakers could in turn confer the label to other winemakers making wines the 0/0 way. The Brutal wine label typically shows the grim reaper with a sickle to SO2, signifying sulfites are cut out of the process. Brutal wines are extremely rare in the natural wine scene. There are now only about 60 producers making Brutal wines globally. Each producer could only make 1 Brutal wine in each harvest and that is usually the most experimental bottling of that harvest. For the Mendall Brutal , only 200 bottles were made in the 2021 vintage.
Our Deal
The Mendall wines are priced extremely well at S$69 per bottle. To mark the launch of the Mendall wines, we are offering 15% discount for any order of 3 Mendall bottles. Use Promo Code MENDALL3 to enjoy the discount.
Click here to view the full Mendall collection.
Have fun as always!
Best regards, Wong Peng Chung (Kenny) Founder and Chief Wine Drinker
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