• Ribera del Ulver Crianza (100% Mencia)

Among small villages sprinkled with slate roofs, some pilgrim route to Santiago discovers a secret that awaits eager to be revealed:

A landscape where no time passes. Little vineyards on a of quiet and spiritual beauty. The vines here are older than us, so we should be quiet and listen in silence what they whisper.

We are entering into the vineyards of Bierzo region, its grape: the Mencia.

The project was based on the restoration of an old dairy in the village of Dehesas in Ponferrada. The remodeling the building tried to combine the stone and slate of Bierzo area with wood, to be in line with traditional architecture in the area.

The project’s objective was to give the winemaker all the necessary equipment to make wine in the most pure.

Each step of the process has been assigned a place with specific conditions of temperature, humidity and light…

Is the case in the barrel room, with not more than thousand oak barrels , manufactured by the most prestigious firms, mostly French oak. The quietness and darkness prevailing here, are interrupted only by our“bodeguero” (Carlos Garcia) or our winemaker and technical director of winery (Raúl Pérez), who are responsible for monitoring the evolution of the wines and determining the optimal timing of balance which ends this step.

Is now more than ten years ago when we began a hard work: the recovering of old vines, small vineyards are that are on today almost 40 ha. of old vines, almost centenarian, in soils and clay minerals mainly in the valleys and alluvial conglomerates in the area of Pieros and Valtuille de Arriba.

Until the time of harvesting, everything is carefully controlled: sugar content of grapes, polyphenol index control, color control… all data that allow us to determine the best time for harvesting the grapes.

The vintage is particularly laborious, can only be done by hand, since there is no space enough for tractors and also the slopes are too steep. Each vine has a limited efficiency often lies below 1.2 kg.

Getting a healthy grapes of excellent quality, means more work in the fields and reduced efficiency per vine by weight. The harvest is done manually in small perforated boxes from 10 to 15 kg, so the grape bunchs arrive whole and in perfect condition until the selection table in the cellar.

Source: http://www.tilenus.com/vinedos/bierzo/