Colet Navazos Reserva Extra Brut Penedes 2007 Sparkling White Wine Tasting Notes:

Featured in Decanter Magazaine, November 2012.

Sparkling (DO Penedés).12,5% alc. Limited release: 2,500 bottles (75 cl.) Degorging: October, 2011.

The first contacts between Sergi Colet and the members of Equipo Navazos took place in 2003, and already in 2005 a collaboration was seriously studied with the purpose of making sparkling wines in the Sherry District. The starting point was our certainty about some structural similarities between Champagne and biologically-aged Sherries: vineyards grown on white chalky soils, the relatively neutral character of the base wines, the importance of a second yeast intervention in the production process, etc. There was also the idea of playing with dosage wines in order to produce different sparkling wines, inspired by the different types of Sherries.

We immediately coincided that there is a fascinating and yet-unexplored territory, and in May 2007 we started fieldwork and tests. The original idea was—and still is—a joint effort where the added know-how and experience of both parts would enable the production of quality sparkling Palomino-based wines in the Sherry District where the character would come not as a result of fruit and primary aromas but from the chalky minerality and the action of flor yeasts, as well as gentle oxidation notes. This part of the project (Navazos-Colet) is still in progress, although commercial releases are not to be expected yet.

In the meantime, Colet and Equipo Navazos have experimented with other parameters, as in the game of combining small amounts of flor yeasts and/or lees for the second fermentation of Penedés sparkling wines. And also experimental disgorgement tests, trying different base wine profiles and dosage combinations with traditional Andalusian types (be they from Jerez, Montilla, or Sanlúcar): dollops of fino, manzanilla, amontillado, palo cortado, oloroso, sweet PX, Cream… The initial approach was to test how far we could go with the Andalusian Sparkling project, but with time COLET-NAVAZOS realized that some of these Catalan sparklers of southern spirit (a crossbreed described as “saleroso mestizaje”, in the words of Josep Roca) were truly serious and elegant wines, so we have decided to release some of them to the market. In 2011 we have released COLET-NAVAZOS 2008 Extra Brut, and this COLET-NAVAZOS RESERVA 2007 Extra Brut, each of them bottled in one single lot with a disgorgement date printed on the back label: October 2011. We are talking, then, about sparkling wines under the appellation Penedés produced according to the traditional (champenoise) method of secondary fermentation in bottle, starting with base wines sourced from Colet vineyards. The southern presence is felt in the secondary fermentation and especially in the use of different dosage wines. COLET-NAVAZOS RESERVA 2007 Extra Brut has undergone a long ageing period of 40 months. Bone-dry, it has virtually no residual sugar. The base wine is dominated by the Chardonnay variety, and the southern contribution gives it a subtle but singular air of flor yeast.

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