Paixar, Bierzo (Castilla y León, Spain) Mencia 2009

Paixar is two things at once:  A very obscure wine in terms of the awareness of the average wine lover, but also one of the greatest wines of the entire world — much less Spain.  Bierzo is a very remote location in the northwest of Spain (which perhaps helps to explain why its wines have only recently been introduced to the wider world) and Mencia is a variety that isn’t found almost anywhere else around the globe, so the obscurity of Paixar is easy enough to understand.  But with that said, the wine’s completely compelling character and obvious greatness keeps it surrounded with an air of mystery, since tasting it makes it seem impossible that it could still be flying under almost everyone’s radar.  The 2009 is a worthy successor to the greatest renditions made since Paixar’s relatively recent debut, namely, 2001, 2004 and 2008.  Like most of the world’s great reds, the 2009 is impressively dark in color and exceedingly deep and persistent in flavor, but what is unusual is that there’s no hint of over-ripeness or over-extraction, which are two chronic shortcomings in “statement wines” that are reaching for the stars.  On the contrary, Paixar 2009 is almost perfectly natural-seeming, with wonderful freshness from acidity that is impeccably balanced in relation to the wine’s fruity sweetness.  Moreover, an intense minerality makes the wine seem much less a product of tricks in the cellar than a marvel drawn directly from the vineyard (and its very old, extremely low-yielding vines).  This attribute is reinforced by exemplary balance between fruit- and mineral-based flavors and spicy, toasty, but very suble oak notes, and indeed the wine has already soaked up almost all of its overtly woody accents, resulting in a seamless character which is very striking in a young wine of such complexity.  I’m not sure I understand how a wine can be completely amazing and completely convincing at the same time, but in this instance both of those reactions are what result from direct experience of it.