Winemaker Notes
Floral, spicy aromas with hints of underbrush. Juicy, well-structured red fruit with great vibrancy and length on the palate. A long finish is marked by hints of herbs, coffee bean, and tomato leaf.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The biggest volume of the winery is the 2021 Ultreia Saint Jacques, which represents some 170,000 bottles, and according to Raúl Pérez, it's the most difficult wine to make here. They now work a lot to produce this wine, a blend of 11 wines selected from the 17 they made. It's a wine that represents Bierzo and is from a year when they used more grapes from sandy soils. It has 13.16% alcohol and a pH of 3.66; it's serious and restrained but juicy and easy to drink. Seventy percent of the wine matured in barrel and the rest in troncoconic oak vats.
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Wine Spectator
Crushed blackberry and boysenberry fruit is dark and ripe in this red, accented by hints of dried lavender, woodsy spices and a subtle underpinning of loamy earth and mineral. Fresh, with light, creamy tannins.
Primarily found in the Bierzo, Ribeira Sacra and Valdeorras regions of Spain and in the Dão of Portugal (where it is called Jaen), Mencia is an early ripening, low acid grape that can produce wines of great concentration, complexity and ageability. And yet Mencia once suffered from a poor reputation and deemed capable of producing simple and light red wines. Post-phylloxera growers would grow this variety on low, fertile plains, which produced high yields and uncomplicated finished wines. Somm Secret—The recent rediscovery of the ancient, abandoned vines planted on rugged hillsides of deep schist has unveiled the potential of Mencia and added discredit to its old reputation.
One of the few northwestern Spanish regions with a focus on a red variety, Bierzo, part of Castilla y León, is home to the flowery and fruity Mencia grape. Mencia produces balanced and bright red wines full of strawberry, raspberry, pomegranate, baking spice, pepper and black licorice. The well-drained soils of Bierzo are slate and granite.