"Raúl Pérez doesn't stop"
A quote from L. Gutiérrez, Spain taster for R. Parker.
And he is absolutely right. Do you remember how enthusiastic I was about this new project from Raúl Pérez? Our entire team visited Raúl at his home in November 2023 and he let us taste no fewer than 101 new things.
Not everything is ready for release yet and for some projects he waits years until he is fully convinced. And sometimes we get lucky and something is just ready when we taste together.
That was exactly the case with his small Valdecañada project, a remote area in the mountains around Ponferrada.
After more than an hour on tiny mountain roads, he showed us a steep slope entirely made up of slate.
This is the village of Valdecañada, where only a handful of vineyards remain.
Everything else has gone wild again. Yet Raúl was incredibly drawn to these almost forgotten vineyards.
He already bought an old warehouse and some vineyards back in 2008, but it is only since 2015 that he vinifies them separately, after years of testing and tasting.
The wines are much more stony, earthy and mineral than his other Ultreia wines from Valtuille in lower Bierzo.
Meanwhile, the old warehouse is filled with barrels and we tasted almost all of them… What wines!!
Once back at his home in Valtuille de Abajo, we tasted the 2018 and immediately knew this was something special.
We absolutely had to get these wines!
Those lucky enough to secure some bottles already have the 2018 in their cellar and hopefully have already enjoyed it a few times… The 2019 vintage was very limited and 2020 was barely produced.
The wine sold out extremely quickly every single time. That is why reservations had already started for the new vintage that has just arrived:
Valdecañada 2021 and especially Cerro de Valdecañada 2021. Without any doubt one of the greatest Bierzo vintages ever made… Even above 2018!
These wines are exceptional, authentic and have that little extra that so many others simply do not have.
This is not mainstream!
Vintage Raúl… Truly outstanding, with tremendous ageing potential.
He produces 2 wines here:
- Valdecañada, coming from several tiny recovered vineyard plots on slate slopes, with a production of barely 2,000 bottles
- El Cerro de Valdecañada, from the oldest vines on the steepest slope. Only 2 barrels produced, totalling just 600 bottles.
Phenomenal wines, both of them. Take advantage while you can, as our allocation is extremely limited.
You need these wines in your cellar, even if it is just one bottle (yes sorry, they are not cheap… bringing these vineyards back to life required a huge amount of time and money).
"Raúl Pérez doesn't stop. Beyond the huge range of wines I tasted, he has more—the R+D wines under the RaúlPérez label, and he has FOUR whole new projects, of which I tasted only Valdecañada (from Ponferrada). The Valdecañada project started in 2008/2009 when he bought a winery in the zone of Ponferrada (Cabildo) that came with two hectares of vineyards. The grapes were added to the Ultreia wines, but he saw the potential to achieve lower alcohol and more freshness and decided to start separating them in 2015. It's a zone with schist and slate soils. The wines that age in that winery are all aged under a veil of flor yeast, which allows him to work with very little to no sulfur. The style of the wines is quite different from the other wines from Pérez. There are three very different zones in Bierzo—Corullón, Valdecañada and Valtuille—different soils and altitudes, and he now works in two of them."