Viticultura tradicional
orgánica y sostenible

Organic and sustainable
traditional viticulture

Casa Aurora

History
Germán R. Blanco

Is a direct tribute to my great-grandmother AURORA GARCÍA – La Señora Aurora -, and an indirect tribute to my village, VILLA DE ALBARES, and its people.It is the rescue and recovery of old vines and ways of working. 

It is that the names of places and people should not be forgotten. Farmers. Grape growers. Workers. It is the bottling of landscapes and stories. Years. Harvests. Bottles that talk and tell us those stories. Ways of doing things and ways of living. Doing those things as they were done before but with the knowledge we have now. With each vintage we produce, we win the battle against this forgetting and against the mountain. Would that we could be an inspiration to others and once again see the hillsides being worked by the young.

CASA AURORRA is made organically. We do not use weed-killers, systemic chemicals, fertilizers or pesticides. Horsehair infusions, buttermilk or sulphur are the treatments we employ to look after our parcels. 

VILLA DE ALBARES is situated in  an area traditionally recognized for coal and mineral deposits, drained by the Sil and the Boeza rivers. These two rivers divide the Bierzo Alto into two valleys: that of the Sil and that of the Boeza. 

We are in the Boeza valley, half way between the mid- and the high mountain, in one of the last villages where the vine is able to achieve optimum maturity in the Bierzo. Ripeness, yes, but almost one month later than the villages of the Bierzo Bajo (Low Bierzo), such as Villafranca, Cacabelos or Valtuille. A wooded region with striking natural contrasts, where the old vineyards are in a constant battle for survival with the chestnuts and oaks that surround them and whose luck resides in the south-facing exposure of the hillsides. Life is not easy in the mountains.
The surviving vineyards are planted on iron-rich red clay soils with a high percentage of granite, which is decomposed to a greater or lesser extent, and are situated at altitudes which range between 780m and more than 1000m above sea level. They are made up of a mixture, which could probably be called typical, of varieties such as Garnacha Tintorera and Garnacha which are at least, if not more, important than Mencía itself and where the white variety Palomino (known here as Jerez) is widely planted along with other whites such as Godello or Doña Blanca, the latter two being less prevalent.

As a general rule, each vineyard that we rescue tends to have a minimum of 25% white grapes (of which the majority is Palomino) and a further 25% Garnacha Tintorera, the rest being made up predominantly of Mencía. We find them like this, we look after them like this and we vinify them like this. 

POULA means “abandoned” and has become a tribute to the “drinking” wine that the locals have always produced.
A wine with a lot of white grapes and Garnacha Tintorera, foot-pressed in an open stone tank and fermented and aged in clay amphoras. It is an ancestral wine, of atypical and imperfect beauty. We make this wine with a mix of parcels which, for diferent reasons (normally parcels which are too small to a make a single-vineyard wine or those with more than 50% white grapes) we consider appropriate, or with the “leftovers” from the other single-vineyard wines we make. It is the only wine we make from a number of diferent parcels.

LA GALAPANA, VALDECONTINA, VALLE DEL RÍO and LA VENDAÑONA are our single-vineyard wines. Wines which for reasons of landscape, soil, age, exposure and the mix of varieties in the vineyard we believe should be vinified and bottled separately. Wines with very diferent personalities.

All of our wines are made and aged in our little cellar in the Calle del Olivo en Villa de Albares and they are all made with grapes which we ourselves have farmed organically. 

 

Wines
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E.E.U.U. / IRELAND / AUSTRALIA