The 2011 Berrande carries the name of a village where he has a vineyard of pure Mencia, 10-year-old vines on a south-facing slope at 700 meters above sea level on young slate soils. He ferments the wine with natural yeast in open wood vats, using one-third whole clusters. The wine aged in used barrels for 10 months and rested in inox for a further 10 months before bottling. The nose requires some coaxing to start revealing the sour cherry and spicy notes, and with time you get attractive notes of Maraschino cherries and blood oranges. All these wines should be enjoyed slowly, following the evolution as they change a lot with time and air. The medium-bodied palate shows good structure, freshness and balance and reveals a wine that might need a little more time to show itself, with some gritty tannins. He adjusted some parameters since the 2009 version of this wine, which I tasted, but found much more oxidative and overripe. 2,000 bottles produced. Drink 2014-2019.
Quinta da Muradella was created in 1993 by Jose Luis Mateo with 15 hectares of owned vineyards in different zones of the Monterrei appellation, some on the valley floor, some on the slopes and some others in the mountain zones where some vineyards reach 100 years of age. He works 20 different plots. All his vineyards are organically certified. He makes a total of 40,000 bottles per year, and experiments with different grapes, different zones, fermenting and aging vessels (wood, stainless steel, concrete) trying to understand the region and the grapes and what works best. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand the process he uses to make some of the wines, and you’ll see that he moves the wines from inox to barrel, from cement to whatever, in what seems to be quite a complicated operation. Some things work and some don’t. He makes varietal wines to examine the different grapes and their potential, he tries different blends, and his ultimate idea is to identify the ideal blend of ancient varieties, the ones that were planted in the region before phyloxera, not only to make the wine, but to plant those varieties already mixed in the vineyard. His collection of wines is completely different from the rest of the wines produced in the appellation. If you ever visit Verin, which has a beautiful old town center and an impressive castle, you should make sure you visit the Mateo family’s bar, A Canteira (the name comes from their father who was a canteiro, a stone mason), where they serve their own house wine, both white and red, made by Jose Luis. It is the best house wine I’ve ever tried in a restaurant. The locals just don’t know how lucky they are. About the person himself, Jose Luis Mateo is extremely humble, a quality I find in the best people across different professions – very generous with his time and everything else. He’s passionate about what he’s doing, and he considers his work a long-term project to bring value and quality to the wines of his region, “hoping that someone will take over and continue the things that I’m doing,” he said. When I asked him what he’d change if he could start again he was very clear. “I’d focus on the mountain vineyards,” he told me. I asked what if it had to be somewhere else in Galicia? “To me the place would be Ribeiro.” And now for something completely different! Jose Luis has been making a range of varietal red wines that he was reluctant to show, since quantities are sometimes tiny, but I found some of them too good not to talk about them; some are also non-DO wines declassified to the Vino de Mesa category.
Importer: Ole Imports. New Rochelle, NY; tel. (914) 740-4724
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