Eduardo Davis from Bodegas Tradicion - Tuesday 2nd June

Mark Dearing, Buyer at Justerini & Brooks was joined by Eduardo Davis from Bodegas Tradicion in this week's Master Series. Watch this masterclass and take a preview into one of the old world’s most underappreciated categories of truly fine wine. Learn about how these wines are produced and what makes them so special but also how best to enjoy these extraordinarily complex wines in conjunction with food.

Learn more about the Bodegas Tradicion.

After a largely troublesome 2017 vintage across most parts of Spain, variously because of frost, hail and drought, the 2018 harvest has refreshed spirits in several of Spain’s most prominent wine regions. 

“Refreshed” in more ways than one as, contrasting the northern reaches of Europe, 2018 is by no means a “solaire” vintage in Spain. Where some struggled, particularly in Galicia and Rioja, because of mildew in spring and early summer, then showers during the harvest which brought with them unwelcome botrytis and necessitated work on the sorting table, others, like Sara Perez at Mas Martinet describe 2018 as a “new inflection point in the history of Priorat”. Alvaro Palacios agrees. “The vineyards were re-born. We had plentiful rain in the winter to build up water reserves, an even spring and a warm but not excessively hot summer. The wines combine beautiful richness of fruit with a clear sense of energy and freshness.” Barrel tastings in Priorat indicate that 2018 will go down as a truly outstanding vintage for the region. Alcohols are lower and the wines stimulating and mineral without wanting for presence or depth.

Despite the freezing darkness and the rain lashing against my windscreen, the notoriously wet winter conditions around Santiago de Compostela could do nothing to dampen my spirits.

It was early, and I was en route to Bierzo to meet Raul Perez at his winery in Valtuille del Abajo. There I would hop from my rental car in to Raul’s 4x4 Shogun and together we would traverse the mountains around Bierzo for the day, variously jumping out to look at special plots and dive in to cold cellars to taste his latest wines. I was on my own pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago, but rather than a waypoint, Bierzo was the destination.

It was hard not to feel a little nervous, for all references to Raul Perez and his influence on the Spanish wine scene over the past decade routinely accede to superlatives. To his legions of fans, both consumers and fellow winemakers, he is a real visionary, cut from maverick cloth, whose determination has revolutionised the way the world looks at Spanish wine. To others, he is wild, unpredictable and impossible to get a handle on. Both are right.

Spain may be a country facing all number of economic problems, but boy does it have some serious winemaking talent.