I Tant Garnatxa Blanca

• Producer: I Tant Vins
• Region: DO Terra Alta
• Vintage: 2020
• ABV: 13%
• Grapes: Garnacha Blanca

This wine will go well with:

• White Fish
• Blue Fish
• Shellfish
• Salads

Set up in 2012, I Tant Vins is the brainchild of Joan Àngel Lliberia, head man at Edetària, one of Terra Alta's most respected wineries, and firm defender of the unique character and personality of indigenous Catalan grape varieties, particularly Garnacha. I Tant's aim is to produce top quality, value for money wines that really reflect the typicity, or characteristics of the local area.

The region of Terra Alta also provides Joan and his team a very broad range of soils to work with. That diversity provides lots of subtle nuances to work with when crafting their wines - each vineyard has its own personality depending on soil type, its location or orientation.

With their commitment to native varieties and old vines, I Tant produce wines of real character and personality that are a wonderful expression of their homeland.

Like its red equivalent, Garnacha Blanca very much takes on the character of the terroir where it’s cultivated and that means the Mediterranean and especially Terra Alta. Terra Alta is a DO in southern Catalunya, just a bit further inland from Priorat and Montsant, and it’s home to around 1,400 hectares of white Garnacha vines – that’s 75% of Spain´s total and a staggering one-third of all the white Garnacha planted in the world!

Terra Alta’s plains, plateaus, and valleys together with its limestone-rich, sandy soils are the perfect environment for the Garnacha Blanca grape, and it’s very much the grape's homeland. In terms of flavours, Garnacha Blanca wines tend to give quite full-bodied whites packed with white fruit and Mediterranean herbs. They can also have an appealing minerality and, over time, take on stone fruit & petrol notes. And if the wine has been oak-aged you’ll often find it infused with lovely aromas of baked apple or bread and brioche flavours.

Terra Alta (literally "high land") sits in the far south-west of Catalunya, on the right bank of the Ebro river. With just over 5,000 hectares planted at between 350 and 600 metres altitude, every year the harvest brings in close to 40 million kilos of grapes.

Just 60km from the sea as the crow flies, Terra Alta enjoys a Mediterranean climate with continental influences, where mild autumns tend to be followed by cold winters, late springs and hot summers. Wind helps keep the vines healthy and rainfall is relatively low – 450mm/year – thanks in large part to the Els Ports mountain range to the south, which can act as a buffer to clouds rolling in from the Mediterranean.

Garnacha, especially the white variety, is king here. At 1,400 hectares, Terra Alta is home to 90% of the Garnacha Blanca planted in Catalunya, and accounts for one-third of the global total. For many of the region’s growers, the variety’s ability to reflect the characteristics of the soil in which it is planted, coupled with its resilience to drought, makes it an ideal choice.

The grapes are carefully selected and harvested by hand in the vineyard with any sub-standard fruit discarded. To maintain quality, the fruit is kept chilled at 10ºC on its way to the winery where the grapes are de-stemmed and undergo a gentle press before temperature-controlled fermentation at 15ºC in 10,000-litre stainless steel tanks to lock in aromas. Once fermentation is complete, the wine is fined and filtered before bottling.