My UK sourced have offered me these two wines. I don’t have any experience with any of them. Tasting notes on CT are sparse too.
It would be good to get inputs from anyone who may have have had experience with them.
Which Raul Perez wines? He makes a number of them. I like most, if not all of them I have had but there are many I have never tasted. Also prices vary significantly as well.
I’ve liked the Palacios ‘Petalos’ offering in the past but haven’t tried the single vineyard/higher end bottlings. Are these scarce where you are? I thought they make tons of the Petalos.
The 18’s from Raul are getting high praise (his Ultreia line). The Vizcaina line, only 17’s have been released. Again, there are a lot of different bottlings running from around $16 (Ultreia de Jacques) to $80 for Ultreia Cepas. Vizcaina’s are usually in the $36 range.
Descendientes makes quite a few bottlings as well. Petalos basically very easy to acquire then up the price scale with Corullon, Las Lamas, Faroana which can be tougher to come by.
I think you can’t go wrong with either producer as they make excellent wines and to me are great qprs. In the US, it’s fairly easy to acquire most of both lines except for some of the really higher priced bottlings with smaller productions.
Mencia is a different grape than many. I love it, but many don’t, so there’s that.
Palacios makes one at the high end of their range called “Las Lamas” that is expensive enough that I generally pass at regular price, but when I can find a deal on it, I grab it. I opened a bottle of the 2007 about six months ago and I really enjoyed it.
I have started buying some of the Raul Perez wines because of the praise they’ve received here and from Gilman, but I haven’t taken delivery of some of them yet and haven’t opened any, and they are all from the last vintage or two anyway. I had not been familiar with them before. They are generally less expensive than “corresponding” Palacios wines, or at least it seems so to me.
They both also have very well thought of “value priced” wines - the Petalos (Palacios) and the Ultreia St. Jacques (Perez).
Here is what was offered. I have requested a 6 pack of Ultreia Valtuille.
That tends to be mid-range and needs some time. May be worth trying the Saint Jacques to get a feel for the grape and style and is usually very approachable at a young age.
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Dinesh - I’m assuming that they’re all the wines from the Bierzo area?
I know most of them.
The Palacios wines are from a project Alvaro does with his cousin. The lowest end is the Petalos. I’ve never been a fan but it’s a decent introduction to the region. The problem with it is that it’s not a very remarkable wine.
You didn’t say what other wines you have but what they did was find a number of vineyards around the town of Corullón. The basic bottling, the Corullón, is a really good introduction to Mencia. You can think of it a little bit like the Produttori de Barbaresco’s basic Barbaresco. It isn’t a “lesser” wine than the others, it’s just a blend of the others. The Moncerbal, San Martin, Las Lamas, and Farona are all single-vineyard bottlings of extremely limited production. The Fontelas is a small section of San Martin. The vineyards are all fairly high in elevation and the wines are all unique in that before he started the project, I don’t know that there were any vineyard specific wines made there. I may be wrong on that though.
A number of years ago we did a tasting of the third vintage - all 2001s. I’ve done a few subsequently. The wines should age well. I don’t know what vintages you have but the mid 2000s were mostly fairly good vintages. I don’t have anything younger than 2010 though, so can’t say much about the newer ones from first hand experience.
The wines of Raul Perez are different again. He’s really the master of the area and he’s pushed the wine making farther along than anyone I can think of, including Palacios. He makes one of the best Godellos around.
If you have the Ultreia Valtuille, that’s mostly Mencia and if I’m not mistaken, he puts a touch of white in it as well. I don’t remember the proportions but there’s a touch of Godello and I think something else. That’s in addition to the Garnacha Tintorera which gives it that dark coloring - Mencia itself isn’t necessarily that dark. The one key feature of good Mencia, and there’s an ocean of crappy Mencia, is that unlike any other grape I can think of from Spain, it has a dusty quality that a friend of mine refers to as charcoal. Many Spanish grapes tend to be fruity - it’s a hot country after all. But Mencia somehow doesn’t hit you with fruit so much as texture if that makes any sense.
I think some of those wines will age nicely. When I’ve done “aged” Mencia tastings, the results have been inconclusive. I really like them fresh and young and then they seem to lose that freshness fast but take a long time to turn into something else.
In any event, they are some of the most interesting wines out of Spain at the moment. Cheers!