Bodega Alegre Valgañon

Falstaff Online Österreich 2023

Oscar Alegre and Eva Valganon got to know, appreciate and love each other while studying viticulture in Italy. However, it is not only their love for each other that unites them, but also their love for high-quality, authentic and original wines. Subsequently, they refined their knowledge in Spain, Eva Alegre comes from a Rioja Alta winemaking family anyway, Oscar Alegre got the finishing touches as a winemaker under the country's icon winemakers par excellence, Alvaro Palacios and Telmo Rodriguez! In 2014, they founded their own small winery in the Obarenes mountains in the far northwest of the Rioja region. But even though Rioja legends such as Lopez de Herredia are not far away to the south and the soils here are comparable to the best terroirs of Rioja Alevesa with their mixture of limestone, clay and sandstone, the altitude and the much more direct influence of the Atlantic Ocean prevented many winemakers from growing wine here in the past. However, the cool and rather damp and wet climate did not deter the two, on the contrary, here they were able to realise their vision of complex, long-lasting, but at the same time cool, minerally fresh and very elegant Rioja wines much sooner than in the warmer corners of the region. In short, the couple are clearly interested in a Rioja style as it once prevailed before climate change influenced the style of the wines. The couple deliberately chose parcels with very old vines, some of which still contain very old, traditional autochthonous grape varieties. In these parcels, Oscar Alegre and Eva Valganon try to give the soil back its naturalness and therefore reject any form of chemistry in the vineyard. In the cellar, they also give some of the white wines a short period of skin contact, which gives them more aromas but also a very distinctive character. The wines from the bodega have an astonishing potential for maturing and ageing. In their way of refusing to follow the fashionable mainstream, in their authentic style, the wines more than just make you sit up and take notice and have long since become critics' favourites, and among Rioja fans they are downright celebrated.

Production Style: Conventional
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