Published by Jeremy.
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The Spanish grape Xarel-lo is one we most often associate with the sparkling wine Cava.
But whenever we see this one as a single varietal still wine, we snatch it right up. With distinctive flavors, Can Sumoi's Xarel-lo is a bit unlike most other grapes you'll try!
A Xarel-lo With Some Distinctive Flavors
This Xarel-lo was pale lemon in color with medium aromas of yellow apple, pear, saline, wet stone, fennel, graphite, and steel.
On the palate, it was dry with high acidity, medium alcohol, body, flavor intensity, and finish. We had notes of lemon, lime, pear, yellow apple, pineapple, toast, wet stone, saline, thyme, and flint.
If you've ever wanted to smell graphite in a wine, this one had quite a bit of it in the aroma department (which, thankfully, dissipated the longer the bottle was open). Although this one had a rather nice flavor profile, the metallic notes in this one were hard to miss- good, bad, or perhaps in this case, otherwise.
Xarel-lo Food Pairing – Mushroom Risotto
We paired this varietal Xarel-lo with mushroom risotto and fennel salad, with the latter picked on purpose to see if it would pair with the herbal notes in the wine.
The risotto itself was rich and creamy and helped highlight more pineapple notes, whereas the fennel salad had a bit of a pop of the flinty stone notes. Although it was pretty good with the risotto, we're not sure we would try the fennel pairing again with this one!
Score 3 / 5
We'd buy a glass of this one.
Overall, this one was quite the distinctive bottle, and came in strong with graphite and stone notes in addition to a wealth of fruit. Is it for us? Well, that really depends. We would always take a glass of it though, but especially so with a great food pairing. Now we want to try more varietal Xarel-lo as still wine to see how other bottles express their flavors!
Can Sumoi is located at Finca Can Sumoi C/ del Montmell – Aiguaviva TP-2442, 43718, (Baix Penedès) Tarragona in Spain. We purchased this bottle locally and enjoyed it in 2025. At the time of publication, a different vintage of this bottle was available on Wine.com.
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