The first release of Noval's 14% table wine is a magnificent success. The wine is a saturated black-purple in colour. The aromas contrive (and this is very typical of the Douro) to suggest something both sweet and bittersharp, like sloes baked in sugar. There is a meatiness, too, in this densely woven, intimate, living aromatic profile. The palate (more bittersweet sloes, crushed stone, wild cystus) is intense, challenging and singular, with huge weight, presence and scented power.

The Douro, I believe, will eventually prove to be one of the world's greatest terroirs for table wine, but its monumental quality -- like Priorat amplified -- makes it a paradoxical challenge for winemakers. The results veer from over-savage and brutal to over-urbane and constrained.

This wine has struck exactly the right note: it is literate and intelligible, yet made without concessions, sketching the landscape of its birth in every powerful and provocative sip. By the way, the second wine (Cedro do Noval) is also exceptionally good -- slightly sweeter and lighter in style, but nonetheless a wine of great structure and depth compared to the Chilean Sangiovese from Errazuriz I happened to be tasting alongside it (on 16.9.07).