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.
First rising to prominence as the winemaker at his family
estate Castro Ventosa, in 2004 he branched out on his own and now maintains a
dizzying array of projects in Bierzo and further afield in Rias Baixas, Ribeira
Sacra, and the Douro with Dirk Niepoort. One of his most exciting projects is
particularly far-flung. It is a collaboration in South Africa with
Swartland-icon Eben Sadie; producing two barrels of Monastrell that are
famously hard to track down. In fact, it is near-impossible to keep track of
all the labels with which Raul Perez is involved. He thinks it is close to 100.
Under the Bodegas Y Vinedos Raul Perez brand comes the Ultreia project,
La Vizcaina de Vinos and the as-yet unreleased micro-production “Raul Perez”
labels, all in Bierzo. In Ribeira Sacra, two wines are produced in partnership
with Bodegas Guimaro: El Pecado and La Penitencia; both have quickly attained
cult status. Sketch Albarino comes from Rias Baixas and is named after his
favourite London restaurant. Rarely are more than 900 bottles of any of these
three wines released. It’s evident that Raul’s restlessness has yielded some breath-taking
wines, many of which are one-offs never to be seen again. He embraces the unconventional,
wherever it occurs naturally: the Ultreia cellar for example has a particular
strain of yeast in the atmosphere, which enables a flor to develop and insulate
the wines, red and white, without the need for sulphur or technology.
Both the La Vizcaina and Ultreia cellars are crammed to the
rafters with barrels that contain either the next-big-thing, or purely
experimental wines, in the truest sense of the word. And after a day of
standing in windy, rainy vineyards and tasting hundreds of barrel samples, feeling
a little daunted, it’s clear that this process is always revising itself,
continuously changing, born from a deep connection with this part of the world.
As we crisscrossed the vineyards and learnt of their intricate complexities and
striking differences, it was hard to shake the feeling that Bierzo is still a
region largely untapped by producers, as the great vineyards of the Northern
Rhone or Burgundy once were too. He knows this, and Perez’s roguish appearance
and death-defying driving techniques are punctuated by moments of startling
clarity and sense of purpose that extend far beyond his own importance.
One of his proudest achievements, he tells me, is being able
to counsel and lend space to an array of brilliant young producers who have
turned to him for inspiration over the years. He admits that his cellar has
become a trampoline for the next generation of Bierzo and Galician producers. Despite
his family’s presence in the region for generations, the current era began he
says, in 1999. This was the year that Alvaro Palacios of Priorat came to Bierzo
and asked him, while winemaker at Castro Ventosa, if together they could
experiment and use a corner of the Ventosa cellar to vinify a small parcel they
had found. An enduring friendship has continued between Raul Perez and Alvaro
and Riccardo Palacios, and today these two producers have raised the bar and
become flagbearers for Bierzo. In fact, Perez believes so resolutely in the
region’s potential that this year he intends to donate vines from El Rapolao,
one his top vineyards, to a couple of younger growers so that they can enjoy
the spoils too. In his words, “I think it is important that we share El Rapolao
for they are the hardest and most expensive grapes to find. We need to go
forward together and present the best that Bierzo has to offer.”
It is this philosophical approach, combined with the means
and reputation to do things his way, that makes Raul Perez a wine producer
quite unlike any other. He is a legend in his own right but bursting with the
candour and ambition of a young upstart. Justerini & Brooks is delighted to
be representing the Raul Perez stable exclusively in the UK as of January 2019.