Comando G

Passion is at the heart of the Comando G project, started as a side hustle in 2008 by friends Fernando Garcia & Dani Landi. On weekends and holidays from their winemaking gigs, the pair wandered the mountains near Madrid, looking for the old-timers toiling away in heroic viticulture, selling their precious fruit at a loss to the local co-op, as well as remote, once-magnificent sites, now abandoned. They've managed to cobble together 10 Ha of grenache vines, along with smaller amounts of white grapes. It's now their full-time gig as the wines have become some of Spain's most wanted bottles and sparked a revolution in the vertiginous Sierra de Gredos region. Ancient vines, high elevations, and the imprint of granite are the key components of the wines, aromatic and detailed, with startingly vivid fruit and long, rocky tannins. They are exceptionally evocative of the wild places they are grown and are amazingly energetic. Broadly speaking, farming is all organic, with some sites seeing biodynamic treatments. Harvest, like the farming, is entirely manual and usually runs into October, thanks to the coolness of these elevations. Reds are generally whole-cluster pressed into vats for long macerations and natural fermentations, then moved to large oak (and sometimes clay amphora) for aging. La Bruja de Rozas is the entry level wine, born of sites with sandy granite soils, 40-65 years of age, and almost 3000' up above sea level. Ethereal and limpid, it is deeply aromatic and shimmers with brambly red fruit and a firm structure. La Brena is one of the top single parcel wines, with a half hectare of 60-year-old vines at nearly 4000' of elevation. Sleek and elegant red fruits married to earth, spice, and floral notes, the concentration building to the rounded tannins for a wine of presence, yet still weightless on the palate. Las Iruelas comes from a plot of head-pruned vines of a similar age, except here, the soils are more complex, with schist, slate, and quartz intermingled with the granite. In turn, there's darker, more brooding fruit and more intensity of spice on a muscular frame. Las Uvas de la Ira is from six plots – all over 70 years of age – scattered throughout the village of El Real de San Vicente, with incredibly varied expressions and harvests of grenache. This is a kaleidoscopic rendition of the grape, expansive in scope, yet refined. Across the lineup, wines from Comando G show incredible freshness, precision, and definition – little wonder why they're so sought after!