Selva Vins
It was a Monday morning in the Marc Fosh kitchen when I bounded in with some good news, "Guys this Sunday we are going to visit a winery in Selva!" I thought this would get them all fired up for the week! David was on the pass finishing the last details of the mise en place, he smiled at me; Daniela and Alfonso answered me with a look of assent and emotion at the same time. "That's going to be really cool!" they responded, never losing their attention from the to-do list.
I guess as a sommelier a trip to a winery is always going to excite me… that anticipation of something new, an unexpected wine that is going to set my senses alive.
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Probably in our imagination when we think of visiting a winery, we imagine enormous hectares of vineyards, a huge stately home with several barrels for aging wine, large technological artifacts whose use is difficult to understand, and abstract terms such as "assemblage" or "batonnage "... well, forget all this.
On Sunday morning, after getting lost at least three times in the fields of Selva, we finally arrive in front of a wooden gate with a sign on the side that mentions "Selva Vins".
Carlos Rodriguez Furthman (winemaker and founder), his wife Barbara and Reg Ward (social manager and co-founder) were waiting for us, smiling and almost more excited than we were. We jumped in and immediately we have been surrounded by rock'n'roll music and the wild side of the "cave" - as Carlos likes to call it - where 12 different wines are well bred under the same philosophy: the use native varieties, minimum type of intervention, giving space to Carlos's creativity, always respecting the true essence of the grapes.
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All this within 20sqm of space, in a garage, better said, where we barely fit. We were surrounded by small stainless steel containers full of must, we talked about the present and the future, new projects and we tasted, more and more surprised, the treasures that Carlos and Reg were serving us little by little.
Among the wines we tried – a monovarietal Prensal without filtering or clarifying, a Natural Sweet Malvasia with passage in chestnut wood and a Gorgollassa that we all fell in love with, one of the wines that most caught our attention was a Clarete.
“We are the first Clarete producers on the island”, said Carlos proudly, showing us the bottle. Many were made of stone.
“What’s a Clarete?” A Clarete is a wine very similar to a light red, but created with a good proportion of white grapes, so the result is an almost pinky wine with little color.
In this case we are talking about 80% white must (Premsal from a 15-year-old vineyard in the Fellanitx area) and 20% red grapes with skins (Mantonegro from a young vineyard in Pollença), but what really counts is the final result: a versatile wine, which stands out for its flexibility, with aromas of white flowers on the nose, while in the mouth it surprises us with a good point of acidity and greater bitterness than in a rosé, but always very fresh and easy to drink.
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When Marc and David presented me with this week's lunch menu, one dish in particular - a yellow gazpacho with marinated salmon, avocado emulsion and amaranth - immediately catapulted me to that Sunday, when words were not enough, when our eyes spoke for themselves and between each glass, our palate asked aloud to return to the freshness and minerality of the "first Majorcan Clarete", on a Spring day that we never wanted to end.
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Website: Selva Vins
