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Featured Wineries
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 Bodega Luzdivina AmigoIn 2002 the Amigo family restored an old, abandoned winery and started Bodegas Luzdivina Amigo. While the winery itself is somewhat new, the fruit that is used to make these unique wines come from 50 and 100+ year-old vineyards that have belonged to the family for generations. The Mencia varietal has been planted in the Bierzo region since Roman times and some believe it to be related to Cabernet Franc. Outside of Bierzo Mencia is quite rare and represents only about 3% of all planted vines in Spain. The winery owns 7 hectares (about 17 acres) of vineyards comprised of number of small parcels and currently produces about 2,000 case of wine each year. To ensure high quality harvest is manual process and starts around mid-September where each parcel is examined nearly daily by the enologist, Elena Otero, to determine the perfect level of ripeness. When ready, grapes are harvested by hand and only the grapes at peak ripeness are collected. Once harvested the grapes are brought to the winery, de-stemmed and pass through a second manual selection process. The grapes are then submitted to a centrifuge to gently break apart and then deposited into specially designed stainless steel tanks. Here they spend the first 7 to 8 days in cool maceration at a controlled temperature between 49-52ºF. After the maceration, the temperature of the tank is allowed to rise to between 68-72ºF for another 15-20 days. The wine then removed and the solids are lightly pressed to extract important tannins and other flavor components. The pressed wine is added back and the wine is allowed to undergo malolactic fermentation at its own pace. Once the malolactic fermentation has finished, the wine is racked between tanks to clarify the wine. Once racked, the wine is lightly filtered and is usually bottled in May. Both racking and bottling are done in the waning lunar cycle.  |