Petit Arnau de Loxarel Rosé 2012

Discovering this wine is a bit like discovering a new band. You hear good reviews, people rave about it, so you give it a go… and then you can’t get enough of it. The thing about new music, though, is that you can kill it by playing it over and over and over (we recently did this with South African songbird Miriam Makeba, who we now won’t be able to listen to for at least a year). This is not the case with this rosé. It is bursting with pure red fruits, while being balanced with super thirst-quenching acidity and a herbaceous edge that will have you coming back time and time again.

Founded in 1986, Loxarel is a family-owned winery located in the Alto Penedes region about 40km West of Barcelona. Loxarel crafts organic and biodynamic table wines and a large range of sparkling wines and Cavas with only estate-grown fruit. It follows organic and biodynamic viticultural practices with the aim of achieving true purity in the wines and to faithfully reflect the terroir.

Winemaker Josep Kitjans studied Oenology at Falset University. After travelling to Australia and France to learn about other wineries, he took the reigns of the family business in 1986, introducing the changes into organic viticulture and later on into biodynamic. He aims to obtain the purest expressions of terroir and, in the past three years, has experimented with natural wines and also a wine fermented in clay amphora.

Petit Arnau de Loxarel rosé originates in two plots of land and, after picking, the grapes undergo 14 hours of cold, pre-fermentation maceration with grape skins to extract their beautiful natural ruby colour. After that, a simple fermentation takes place in inox tanks at a temperature of 16ºC.

Deep glowing pink in colour, with lifted bramble and cherry on the nose, it goes on to become a thrillingly pure affair of ripe red fruits on the palate, with a perfume of cool herbs. It finishes with a slight tannic grip and a moreish, wet stone juiciness that makes it quite addictive.

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