I recently received some new wines from Castell del Remei. If you’ll recall (although I’d be thoroughly amazed if you did), I reviewed their younger wines a few months back. The Oda white and red wines represent a very different profile as they take up the mid-range offer from the winery and do it admirably.
Of course, they’re using Merlot and Cab for the red and then Chardonnay and Macabeu for the wine which means that only one of the grapes is a local variety. This is not that untypical in DO Costers del Segre (literally, slopes of the Segre River) which is a very unknown region to anyone who doesn’t live in Catalonia. On many levels, this is a shame given that there are some quite fine wines being made in the region and I don’t feel they get a lot of attention.
This is most true for the higher altitude wines up by the town of Tremp which I’ve just been tasting lately for an upcoming magazine article. The wineries up there might be splitting off in to their own DO someday as they’re vastly different from what you find further south but I quickly digress as Costers del Segre is a complicated topic which is probably why it doesn’t see that much attention.
For those looking to dig a little bit in to the region, these two wines offer up a very nice entry point and are leagues more complex in terms of what is offered from their reliable, yet basic young wines. Now I’ll just have to taste the most recent vintage of their top-end wine, 1780 some day to round out their portfolio.
