Malas Uvas 2023

As a natural passage of a family legacy, countless winemakers take up the craft of winemaking through their parents' influence, but that isn't the case for Nacho González, whose inspiration was, and still is today, his grandmother. A bit of history: in 2011, Nacho, a biologist by training, returned to his roots, to Valdeorras, one of Galicia's most important wine regions, to work — until 3pm in the afternoon — on European Union projects related to allocating funding aimed at rural development.

With the free time he had in the afternoons, he set about restoring three bush-vine plots that his grandmother had left him. It was the start of a search that still today has him roaming the valleys of Valdeorras looking for abandoned, lost vineyards. This is how the fascinating personal project “La Perdida” was born.

Nacho's grandmother was a farmer all her life, and the vineyard was just one more of the crops she grew. However, both the way she worked the vineyard and the way she made wine in the winery remained forever fixed in her grandson's memory, since nothing was ever added to the grapes, either in the vineyard or in the winery. Being a biologist, Nacho knew that his grandmother's empirical concepts were absolutely correct, so following in her footsteps was, for him, more than an obvious choice — it was the right path, the only path.

His first harvest saw the light of day in 2012: one white wine and one red, totalling 600 bottles. Nowadays, Nacho produces an amount he's comfortable with, between 16,000 and 20,000 bottles a year, according to the dictates of nature. But it isn't so much in the quantity of bottles produced that Nacho's restless spirit shows through, but rather in the total number of different wines he makes — at the moment he has 17 different labels on the market.

In every plot he finds, Nacho first devotes himself to restoring the soil, eliminating any trace of chemical products through the use of green manures (rye and vetch), organic substrates (crushed gorse) and organic fertiliser, all with the aim of bringing even more life to the soil. It's worth noting that the different plots he works span a geological variety of limestone, clay, slate and granite. The vines, ranging in age from 35 to 80 years old, receive natural plant-based treatments such as yarrow, nettle, horsetail or comfrey, combined with clay sprays from the Valdeorras region, and pruning is always done late, at the end of March. In the winery, so that nature dictates the fate of the harvest, the grapes are trodden and nothing more. Fermentations take place in used wooden barrels and in 400-litre Spanish clay amphorae (tinajas), made by the renowned amphora maker Juan Padilla, using a 2-year ageing process with no treatment whatsoever, so they interfere as little as possible with the wine.