O Pando Orange 2021 - La Perdida

Many of Nacho's parcels around Larouco lay abandoned before he restored them to health, hidden among bush or mountain trails. These untrellised vines, planted in the early-mid 20th century, tell us much about the fascinating viticultural history of this rugged, dramatic landscape. Nacho began making wine in Larouco, close to his grandmother's home in Seadur, after she gifted him a parcel of vines just outside the village. That was in 2013. Since then, Nacho left his career as a biologist behind, becoming immersed in his winemaking project and his mission to preserve these old vineyards and varieties by showcasing their quality. In the face of encroaching pressures to conform to market demands and the homogenising prescriptions of industrial farming, Nacho has stood firm, an iconoclast of sorts, and persevered in making thrilling, terroir-driven wines, that tell an almost forgotten story of this region's fascinating history. Many of the sites are dramatic and remote, a quality that often finds an uncanny expression in Nacho's wines.

Nacho farms 5 hectares or so in total, mostly old untrellised vines on granite, slate, and clay between 450 and 650 metres. Farming is organic in practice, with some biodynamic and mycological preparations with nettle, horsetail, and comfrey infusions replacing conventional sprays, and fungal preparations are applied to restore soil biology on parcels that had been left to degrade. He has declined organic certification as the scheme permits some chemical use in the vineyards (certification is also costly). Having spent a month working with Nacho during the 2021 harvest, the rich biodiversity among his vines tells it’s own story.

His cellar in Larouco is as lofi as it gets... Gravity carries the juice from the press to a basement where padilla tinajas, old barrels, and stainless tanks are preferred to finish fermentation and age the wines. Everything rests on its lees through winter and is bottled the following spring without fining or filtration. La Perdida means "the lost." Nacho chose the name for the vineyards themselves, most of which had disappeared into the landscape, forgotten to all but the well-trained eye.

Valdeorras sits in the Sil river valley in the province of Ourense, where the river cuts through the mountains of interior Galicia on its way west toward the Atlantic cutting an operatic landscape of valleys, terraces and hills. The dominant geology is pizarra, the dark fractured slate that defines the best parcels in the valley, breaking down slowly into thin, mineral, free-draining soils that force vines deep for water and give the wines their characteristic saline, stony character. O Pando sits on granite and clay rather than slate, at around 500 metres, which gives Nacho's Godello more body and textural weight than wines fro the valley floor.

Godello was brought back from near-extinction in the 1970s by a small group of local producers who found surviving plants in abandoned vineyards and used them to repopulate the region. The vines they saved were old, low-yielding plants, selected over generations for their ability to survive in these soils rather than for commercial output. The clones subsequently grown were selected for higher yields, ripen more evenly, and give less concentrated juice. Old vine Godello viejo from parcels like O Pando produces small quantities of thick-skinned, concentrated fruit that behaves differently in the cellar. Those thick skins allow for these long macerations in tinaja(though they're not commonplace by any means), with enough tannins and material extract in the fruit to stay the coarse and create a wine of substance and complexity.

Grapes: Godello

Region: Larouco, Valdeorras, Galicia, Spain

ABV: 15%