Van Zellers VZ Tinto 2023

The 2019 Tinto VZ is an old-vines (50 to 80 years in age) field blend aged for nine months in mostly used French barriques. It comes in at 14.1% alcohol. This is the first vintage with newly acquired vines at high altitude. A terrific offering, this is wonderfully fresh but also tightly wound and beautifully structured. It lacks the richer and bolder fruit of the 2015 in this report, but the precision, freshness and the intensity might mean this bests it eventually. It is obviously more undeveloped. I'm not really sure which I like better. They are just different, and I like both a lot. You can drink this now, but it will be better in a year, maybe two, if you have patience. It should last for 15 years from the vintage date, maybe more. We'll start there.