Telmo Rodriguez, Yjar, 2019

Telmo Rodriguez is one of Spain's great winemaking adventurers, and Yjar is among his most quietly radical projects. Made from old-vine Garnacha grown high in the mountains of Navarra, on soils that most growers abandoned decades ago, this is a wine that has almost nothing to do with the jammy, crowd-pleasing version of the grape. It is leaner, wilder, more mineral, with a kind of iron-boned energy that speaks directly to altitude and schist rather than sunshine and extraction.

The 2019 vintage is showing beautifully taut dark fruit — blackberry, wild cherry, dried fig — wrapped around a core of stony grip and dried herbs. There is real tension here, the kind that makes you reach for the glass again before you have quite finished thinking about the last sip. Drink it from now until 2038, though patience through 2028 or 2029 will be well rewarded.