Pegaso Zeta · 2023

The Compañía de Vinos de Telmo Rodríguez wine firm has travelled far and wide in Spain to discover a complex country of wines with incredibly diverse, rich and unique winemaking landscapes. They have based their project on understanding how previous generations worked, using only local grape varieties, recovering long-lost vineyards, finding the best areas for production and creating terroir wines which interpret historic vines in a natural way. Pegaso was born in 1999 as part of a project seeking out old Grenache vines in the Sierra de Gredos hills and working to ensure their survival in the extreme landscape and climate of Cebreros, one of the most recently registered DO appellations in Spain. They bought their first vines here, wonderful Grenache plants left to grow wild at a forgotten and hard-to-work site located at an altitude over 1000 metres above sea level. The slate seam they found at Arrebatacapas, unique in the Gredos region, showed promise that great wines could be created here. Their simplest and most accessible wine, Pegaso Zeta, was born 20 years later from old vines cultivated by the firm and their suppliers using organic agriculture methods. Grapes are harvested by hand and the fermented wine is aged for six months in 500-litre French wooden barrels before standing for a further 6 months in stainless steel tanks. It may be a simple wine, but it is brimming with personality – a small, yet great wine. In the glass, Pegaso Zeta displays a claret-cherry colour with a low-medium intensity, and dense translucent legs. A gentle nose of ripe red fruits, herbal aromas like bay leaves and other spices, and earthy hints give it a rustic feel while the granite and slate of Gredos produce mineral aromas. It is pure pleasure in the mouth; an intense, fresh and deep wine with a certain degree of bitterness highlighting toasted notes, red fruit, silky tannins and, once again, a welcoming rusticity making it a very moreish wine. Don't miss out - undoubtedly, Pegaso Zeta is a safe bet well worth trying.