Rumbo al Norte, Vinos de Madrid 2019

Why this bottle matters

Rumbo al Norte comes from three tenths of a hectare of north-facing Garnacha at about 1,075 metres in Villanueva de Ávila, the vines tucked among granite boulders. Roughly a thousand bottles are made in a year. Luis Gutiérrez of The Wine Advocate scored the 2019 ninety-nine points, calling it the palest vintage this wine has ever produced and a triumph over the natural conditions of a warm, dry year, with the finest-grained tannins of anything he tasted from the team. Nine hundred and thirty-two bottles were filled, and twelve magnums.

The 2019 sits inside the run that made the wine's name. Gutiérrez had given perfect hundred-point scores to the 2016 — one of his wines of the year — and again to the 2018, whose fruit he followed from the vineyard itself and judged among the most perfect he had ever seen. Against that standard, the 2019 answered with the palest colour in the wine's history. With nine hundred and thirty-two bottles and twelve magnums in existence, most of the vintage will never reach the open market at all; a documented example is closer to a registry entry than to a listing.

Cellaring perspective

Greg Sherwood MW has called Rumbo al Norte the most collectable single-vineyard Garnacha in the world. Pale and weightless on release, it deepens for a decade and more — a wine whose lightness is structure, not fragility.