Molino Real Sierras de Malaga Mountain Blanco 2015

When Telmo Rodríguez founded his eponymous wine company with partner Pablo Eguzkiza in 1994, they were inspired by the remote and forgotten landscapes of Spain. They knew that great wines had been made throughout rural Spain in the past, but in the early nineties, few had the vision required to imagine those forgotten regions and varieties could rise again. Most everyone else was busy crafting cheap, anonymous wines with international varieties. One has to remember that Australian wines were the hottest wines at that particular moment and Spain was being told that they needed to follow the cheap international varietal approach of the day. Not Telmo and Pablo. They knew better from their formative winemaking experiences in France to trust in indigenous varieties and look for inspiration in old vineyards. They spent a lot of time reading old books, picking up hints of where and how the historic wines of Spain were made. In the course of their research, they came across the “Mountain Wines” of Málaga, once a favorite wine of the English. Less famous than Sherry, the wines of Málaga were at a substantial disadvantage, commercially speaking, from their Andalucian neighbors. The wines were made in a rugged, mountainous inland area, rather than right by a major port. As such, the wines eventually simply faded into obscurity after phylloxera, yet Telmo and Pablo were determined to recover the former glory of Málaga’s mountain wines. Thus, Molino Real was born in 1996.

Moscatel grapes for their flagship Molino Real wine come from nine hectares of vaso bush-trained vines on steep slate slopes at elevations between 350 and 1,000 meters, located around the village of Cómpeta, in the rugged Axarquía region in Málaga. As is traditional, the grapes for the sweet wines are dried on cañas, reed mats, in the sun. Frames are set up so that temporary roofing can be used in case of rain. Dehydration by sun-exposure concentrates grapes in such a way that all the sugar and alcohol in the resulting wines come strictly from the grapes.

Most of the harvest is lost to dehydration, as 10 kilos of grapes are needed to produce 2.5 kilos of raisins, which yields just one liter of juice to ferment into wine. The sun-drying process, asoleo, is a tough manual job. After picking grapes on dangerous slopes with 40-60% incline, perfect and undamaged bunches are carefully placed in harvest boxes and arduously carried up the mountain to the winery, where they are carefully laid on the pasera and progressively turned to obtain homogeneous dehydration. Once the bunches reach the desired degree of dehydration, they are pressed with old olive oil presses, bunches being separated by grass mats. Fermentation is long and happens in 225-liter oak barrels, where the wine matures at low temperature for 20 months. The result is a rich, long-lived, sweet wine that honors the tradition and history of the “mountain wines” of Málaga.