Turó d’en Mota 2008: Sparkling Wine of the Year at the Verema Awards 2022
Turó d’en Mota 2008 has been choose as the Sparkling Wine of the Year at the Verema Awards 2022. The accolade is given based on the votes of both sector professionals and all the wine and gastronomy enthusiasts who make up the verema.com community, which currently has over 47,500 registered users and is visited by more than 600,000 people every month.
Ton Mata Moliner, a member of the third generation of the Recaredo family, was a finalist in the “Wine World Person of the Year” category and accepted both awards at the Verema 2022 awards ceremony, which was held at the Hotel Balneario Las Arenas in Valencia and attended by all the award winners and finalists.
The Vendimia tasters describe Turó d’en Mota 2008 as having “a good attack, which is delicious, with magnificent acidity, great structure, fully integrated effervescence, creamy, ample and very long”.
Turó d’en Mota 2008: a memorable vintage
The 2008 vintage produced healthy grapes with extraordinary acidity, ideal for the long ageing that this Corpinnat undergoes – a minimum of 12 years and a half – resulting in a yield of 4,317 bottles. The vintage was marked by meteorological contrasts: a moderately dry and warm autumn and winter, followed by a rainy spring, which set the pace in the vineyard. The result is a wine of great harmony and delicacy that reveals the most authentic essence of the Mediterranean, with low yields (21.3 hl/ha) of very high-quality fruit. Turó d’en Mota 2008 has been fermented in 300-litre oak barrels.
The 2008 vintage has been recognised by various institutions in the world of wine. Robert Parker Wine Advocate ranked Turó d’en Mota 2008 among the top sparkling wines, with a score of 97 points, the highest ever awarded to a sparkling wine in Spain. According to taster Luis Gutiérrez, “It’s a magnificent white wine with bubbles – completely different, with loads of personality and character.”
Turó d’en Mota 2008 has also been lauded by La Guia de Vins de Catalunya 2023, which ranked it as the best Catalan wine, the best sparkling wine, and the best Xarel·lo wine among over 1,100 wines and 206 wineries, awarding the vintage a score of 9.86. The Corpinnat wine is described as “extraordinary” and “elegant” for its overall balance and harmony, and “mineral” because it evokes the calcareous soil, adding an extra dimension of connection to the land.
Finally, La Vanguardia’s Guía de Vinos 2023 recommends this Corpinnat as one of its essential wines for 2023. In the words of taster Lluís Tolosa, the wine “represents the elegance of simplicity”. He added: “Recaredo makes wines that remain impeccable for over 20 years.”
First single-variety sparkling wine in history
Turó d’en Mota, a 0.97-hectare bush-trained vineyard planted in 1940, is an important part of the natural heritage of the Penedès region. The first vintage was 1999. Released in the spring of 2008, it was the first sparkling wine produced in the Penedès wine region using grapes of a single variety, Xarel·lo, from a single vineyard. The vintage was also an expression of Recaredo’s commitment to extremely long ageing.
The Turó d’en Mota vineyard is located in the far northwest of Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, in the heart of the Penedès region, on the northern slope of a hill known as Turó d’en Mota, from which it takes its name. The soil of the Turó d’en Mota vineyard is notable for the presence of carbonate nodules, formed through the concentration of lime in the soil, that give each vintage of this Corpinnat great character.
According to Ton Mata, Turó d’en Mota represents the dream of bottling a vineyard and making a terroir wine in the broadest sense – an expression of land characterised by highly calcareous soil, a Mediterranean microclimate, and an approach to viticulture that stresses observation over intervention.
