JamesSuckling.com Senior Editor Zekun Shuai talks with Santiago Deicas of Bodega Familia Deicas in Uruguay about the 2020 vintage, how Familia Deicas makes its tannat wines, and where the Uruguayan wine scene is headed.
"It's been one of those harvests like in 2018, where we had a little amount of rain during harvest, but in 2020 we also had quite low temperatures for a dry vintage so it was a very concentrated vintage in whole," Santiago said.
Santiago also said their process for making tannat wines had changed since 2015. "For tannat, what we like the most is getting the tannins from the skin, because if you analyze tannat as a variety, you have a huge amount of tannins in the seeds," he said. "The seeds are much more tannic than any other seed in any other variety ... and this concentration is also very high in the skin of the tannat. So what we've been focusing on in the past seven years is extracting the tannins from the skin and not from the seeds.
"If you go deeper into quality of tannins, the quality of the skin tannins is way more sweet and the texture is much more juicy than in the seed."
Familia Deicas Garzón Single Vineyard 2020
Familia Deicas Progreso Single Vineyard 2020
