Blanco Granito 2019 from Pazo Torre Penelas
Familia Torres’s new winemaking venture in Rías Baixas unites innovation and ancestral viticulture. The result is a wine of varietal freshness with an identity marked in stone. A briny Atlantic profile. Citrus essence, pronounced acidity, and fragrant stone fruit. It strikes a mineral balance, so to speak, between historical tradition and modern innovation.
Blanco Granito 2019 is the first wine to be vinified and aged in granite vats made from the predominant rock type that distinguishes the Galician appellation of origin.
Blanco Granito 2019 (DO Rías Baixas)
Located in the municipality of Portas (Pontevedra) in the Valle de Salnés, Pazo Torre Penelas is Familia Torres’s new winemaking venture in Rías Baixas, a region where the wine producer has been active since 2012. Helmed by winemaker Víctor Cortizo, the venture focuses on unique wines made in innovative egg-shaped granite vats, which allow for the most honest expression of the six-hectare walled vineyard that is part of the property. Listed in the historic heritage register, the pazo (estate) dates from the 14th or 15th century and features elements that are typical of these Galician estates, including a hórreo (a raised granary), a dovecote, and a chapel. In 2018, Familia Torres installed a small winery on the ground floor of the estate’s tower to experiment with vinification in granite.
Pazo Torre Penelas in Valle de Salnés
“With this project, we wanted to innovate by drawing on the place itself and the history that can be read in the stone wine presses carved into the granite, most of them Roman in origin. This is why we decided to incorporate granite vats in the fermentation and eight-month ageing process of the wine, as a nod to this ancient form of viticulture where stone and wine went hand in hand”.
Miguel Torres Maczassek, fifth generation Familia Torres
Geographic map of DO Rías Baixas
What characterizes granite is its porosity, which allows for a constant micro-oxygenation of the wine, thus enhancing aromas and imparting the minerality and briny essence of the stone. The egg shape allows the wine to move within the vat, keeping the lees suspended and adding greater creaminess and volume to the palate.
Granite vats enhance the aromas and minerality of the wine and add greater creaminess, volume, and length on the palate.
Marked by the influence of the sea and the Umia River, which articulates the Valle de Salnés and is a stone’s throw from the estate, Blanco Granito 2019 is an exceptional wine and the first to be fermented and aged in granite. The wine ferments in the egg-shaped granite vats for 15 days at a temperature of 14ºC, and then stays in those same vats for eight months in perennial motion, which keeps the lees suspended. Afterwards, the wine spends another eight months in stainless steel prior to bottling.
The wine Blanco Granito 2019 (DO Rías Baixas)
The resulting wine displays a beautiful green colour with golden highlights, clean and brilliant. On the nose, Blanco Granito preserves its intense varietal aromas, along with notes of sea and salt water, citrus, and stone fruit. The palate offers pronounced but well-integrated acidity, revealing a briny Atlantic profile enveloped in a great sensation of volume. A balanced, long, expressive wine.
Blanco Granito is yet another example of ancient traditions inspiring modern innovation. From primitive to sublime. Uniting the salt of the sea and the minerality of the stone, Blanco Granito is a wine born of the earth that looks to the ocean. The granite provides the essence, the wine...the deep love of a place.