Before developing a taste for wine, I was already a coffee fanatic by middle school – a regular self-taught barista. I had a special passion for espresso and I was extremely serious about it, so much so that I even bought my own professional espresso maker – a Rancilio Classe 6. From there, my ambition to make the best espresso on the planet, or at least in Beijing, only grew.
But my passion for making espresso waned after I discovered filtered coffee, often using beans of a lighter roast but coarser ground. Making one was just like making tea – using the infusion method. Simply pour hot water over it to extract the goodness. The history of filtered coffee, of course, predates the invention of the espresso machine – the pressurized method of speeding up extraction that was born of Europe’s Industrial Revolution and helped kick off the commercialization of coffee.
Winemaking follows a process similar to coffeemaking, whether the espresso method or the filtered method. But drinking a cup of Vitícola Mentridana Méntrida Cantos del Diablo 2020 reminds me of drinking a delicious, slow-brewed filtered coffee. It is made using slow, soft and long infusion winemaking with whole-cluster garnacha from Gredos, Spain, that comes from a 0.35-hectare, north-facing vineyard at an altitude of 900 meters.
The vines were planted in the 1960s, and in 2020 winemaker Daniel Landi produced 1,730 bottles of the Cantos del Diablo from them. The soil is granitic, sandy and silty with little clay, which seems perfect for a grape as delicate and red-fruited as garnacha for infusion winemaking.
The result is a wine with little flesh but full of tension and etherealness. It is reductive, peppery and chalky, with lots of wild herbs, grapefruit, berries and pomegranate. The color is beautifully lustrous, vibrant and transparent, and the palate is energetic and so delicate, light and refined, but also full of subtle flavors.
Landi also makes the Comando G lines of wines with Fernando Garcia, and we just visited their amazing Rumbo Al Norte vineyard last month.
Compared with the even more taut, mineral and tenser Comando G Rumbo Al Norte and the wilder Comando G Tumba del Rey Moro, the Cantos del Diablo falls into the same genre but has a little more fruit. More important, as Comando G is getting extremely expensive, the Cantos del Diablo still represents good value, with a retail price of less than $120. But it remains a serious wine, and drinking a whole bottle would come effortlessly.
– Zekun Shuai, Senior Editor
