Founded in 2005, the winery is located in Pieros, a hamlet in the heart of the Camino de Santiago (St. James’ Way) route, between the villages of Cacabelos and Villafranca.
Architect Jesús Manzanares found inspiration in the wall surrounding the nearby Castro Ventosa Roman castrum to design the winery. Losada currently grows 12 hectares split into manu small plots (locally called ‘piezas’) in the area of Pieros and Valtuille which have been progressively recovered. Clay soils are a common feature in most of them and one that marks the style of the wines as opposed to Mencía grown on schist soils which is usually more structured and powerful.
Born into a family of local winegrowers, Amancio Fernández has been making the wines since the very beginning and is the man behind the recent change of style which is particularly noticeable on the 2015 vintage. Extraction is now more gentle and the wines feel less oaky thanks to the use of 500-litre barrels which are helping to move towards fresher, more expressive wines with distinctive aromatic palates.
Total production accounts for 250,000 bottles. El Pájaro Rojo (€8, literally “the red bird”) is the entry-level red, a single-varietal, fully destemmed Mencía with three months of oak-aging. Losada (€11) is the flagship wine and could be considered their regional wine. Grapes are sourced from their own old vines grown on clay soils as well as others from local growers; sometimes small quantities of whole bunches are used.
The same winemaking philosophy and soils apply to Altos de Losada (20,000 bottles. €16), whose grapes come from the producer’s own vineyards scattered over more than 20 plots. The change of style in this wine, aged in 500-litre barrels, started in 2013 but 2015 could very well be described as its culmination. La Bienquerida (around 5,000 bottles, €29 in Spain) is a single-vineyard red from a plot planted in 1906 on schist-ferric soils with around 5% of other grapes intermingled with Mencía. Around 20% of the wine is fermented with stems and the style is darker, more mineral and concentrated.
Starting in the 2015 vintage, two new single-vineyard reds have been added to the range: Altos de Losada Pobladura (only 1,000 bottles) and La Senda del Diablo (1,200 bottles, the name meaning “Devil’s path”), both of which are aged 50% in oak, 50% in amphorae. While Pobladura is a fragrant, delicate Mencía grown in clay soils, La Senda del Diablo is a single-varietal, rather wild and tannic Alicante Bouschet (Garnacha Tintorera).
There’s also a Mencía rosé called 5 Rosas (€8) and a single-varietal Godello (around 5,000 bottles, €12 in Spain) which was first released in the 2014 vintage; 30% of the wine is aged in oak and the rest in stainless steel tanks. Grapes for this white are sourced from old vineyards tended by local winegrowers.
