2019s from Nacho Gonzalez of La Perdida

12/16/20 -

Tasting the new arrivals from Nacho Gonzalez in Valdeorras is always exciting for me. The wines are invariably intense: youthful, coltish, and sometimes even odd. But there's such a lively quality to all of them, a shared exuberance that I find totally inspiring. Each wine is memorable and so itself, if that makes any sense.

Nacho Gonzalez is a biologist by training. He has been making wine in Valdeorras since 2012. He inherited a vineyard ('O Trancado') from his grandmother. Planted with old vines of Garnacha Tintorera and Mencia, it was in poor shape. He set out to revive it. In doing so, and in continuing to seek out and revive old vineyards in the area, he created one of the most unique wine projects in Spain.

The wine region of Valdeorras is increasingly commercialized and industrialized, as large conglomerates move in to produce inexpensive bulk wines. This has led Nacho Gonzalez to search out remote, isolated, difficult to work sites of neglected vines. La Perdida (the lost) is a fitting name for his work. He brings life to these ancient vineyards with careful organic and biodynamic farming. And from these ancient, low-yielding vines, he is producing vivacious, fascinating natural wines that are unlike anything that I've ever encountered.

In the cellar and in the vineyard, Nacho is a traditionalist. He employs the Tinaja (a specially-shaped clay amphora) and continues to work and vinify wine from vineyards co-planted with red and white grapes. He often coferments the grapes from these sites, and all of his wines made from white grapes see skin-contact. All vinification and bottling is done without additives and by hand.

2019 was a warm, wet, and difficult vintage in Galicia. But you would be hard-pressed to find any indication of that in these expressive, vivacious wines. United by their liveliness, they're all extremely special, and I'm pleased that we are able to offer them in a bit more volume than we have in the past.

I'd like to note, also, that these wines have just arrived. Their travel from Valdeorras has left them a bit shaken and a bit wilder than normal. Past vintages have shown us that this condition doesn't last much more than a few months: I think all of these wines will definitely be even better in March than they are now.

-Ben Fletcher