'El Viejo'
Toro DO · Castilla y León, Spain
- 100ml
- £12
- Bottle
- £90
A Coravin draws the wine through the cork under argon without opening the bottle. It lets us pour 100ml of wines we could not otherwise offer by the glass.
- Grape
- Tinta de Toro
- Region
- Toro, Castilla y León
The short version
The vines are pre-phylloxera and over a hundred years old — they survived because sandy soil kills the louse.
Matsu is Japanese for 'to wait', and the labels are photographs of real growers at three stages of life.
The biggest wine on the list. If they want power, this is the pour.
How it tastes
Aroma & flavour
Sell it with
Short Rib, Beef Fat Chimichurri & Crispy Potato
This needs fat, salt and char to stand up to it and to tame the alcohol. The tannin scrubs the beef fat, and the new-oak sweetness meets the crust on the meat. Do not point it at anything delicate — it will flatten it.
Where to take them next
The detail — if they ask
Hand-picked into small crates from vines over a hundred years old, ungrafted and pre-phylloxera. Spontaneous fermentation on native yeast in concrete, malolactic in the same vessels, then well over a year in new French oak. Soft filtration, no aggressive fining. Big, velvety and unapologetic.
Matsu
- Producer
- Founded in 2006 by the Rioja group Vintae as a project to raise Toro's profile. Matsu owns no vineyards — it buys from around a hundred local growers, which is how the old vines get preserved. Matsu is Japanese for 'to wait'.
- Region
- Toro sits on the Duero, hotter and harsher than Ribera del Duero, with extreme drought and very consistent ripeness. The soils are sandy — and sand kills phylloxera, which is why vines here survived when the rest of Europe was replanted.
- Grapes
- Tinta de Toro is Tempranillo, but a distinct local clone adapted to heat and drought. Small berries with thick skins give a high skin-to-juice ratio — which is exactly why Toro reds come out this dark and this concentrated.
The three labels are photographs of real growers at three stages of life — El Pícaro the young man, El Recio the middle-aged, El Viejo the old man, from the oldest vines of all.