Pago de las Encomiendas, a model winery with a stunning red wine: Xentia

A few days ago, we attended a wine tasting promoted by a young winery, Pago de las Encomiendas, located in the South West of Spain. It belongs to a category of modern, focused wineries with a clear goal: making original, good wines at reasonable prices.

Besides offering a quiet explanation on their philosophy (nightly harvesting, ecologic culturing of grapeavines, etc) and their ways of making wines, we tasted four of them: Nadir Blanco, Nadir Rosado, Nadir Tinto, and their best product: an absolutely stunning red wine called Xentia.

I was completely blown away by its quality. The grapes used to make Xentia are changing every year, since according to the winery owners, they select the very best of their grapes, every year, in order to make Xentia. I don't know about previous years, but I can say that this is one of the red wines that impressed me the most in the last years, certainly one which deserves to be singled out among the recent Spanish wines.

Further information is available at the Pago de las Encomiendas website. We were told that, together with the Habla winery (another modern classic from Extremadura, which will be discussed in the future at this blog), Pago de las Encomiendas is one of the most widely recognized wineries in that region, in 2011. And this was a most pleasant surprise for me to discover.

Hereafter you can watch a video of a visit to this winery, made in 2008 (nothing to do with me, I just found it at youtube).