When slate mining transformed the traditional way of life in Valdeorras in the 1960s, many families stopped working their vineyards, especially those on steeper and hard-to-access slopes, to make a living from the extraction of a rock that nowadays accounts for a third of the area's gross domestic product.
Teresa López Fidalgo's was one such family. Her grandfather, who made bulk wine, was born in Viladequinta, a Galician village in the river Casoio valley, a tributary of the river Sil and close to the border with Castilla y León. His father also made some wine from the family vineyards but ended up selling the land to open a slate factory where Teresa also worked after graduating in law. "My grandfather always talked about O Cabalín and said that it had the best vineyards in the area for making red wine,” recalls Teresa, who swapped law for viticulture and used the name of this site for her old vineyard project.
In 2015 Teresa bought her first plot in O Cabalín, near her grandfather's village, together with her husband Luis Peique. Known as El Maestro (the teacher) in Bierzo (he teaches History in Secondary Education and at the Spanish Open University), Luis has always had a strong connection with the vineyards in Valtuille de Abajo, where his family owns Bodegas Peique. The third partner at O Cabalín is Irishman Hugh McCartan, Teresa's English teacher (both pictured above) and friend of the couple, who has invested his savings in more vines for the project and lends a hand as needed —be it planting, weeding, treading grapes or chauffeuring visitors— whenever his day job allows him to do so.
With considerable investment, a strong dose of romanticism and dedication, the trio now owns over three hectares of vineyards spread among more than 30 plots with slate soils in the villages of Viladequinta, on the south-facing slope, and north-facing Carballeda, across the valley.
The three of them jointly look after the vineyards and the wines, although Teresa is the permanent presence there on a daily basis and, with eternal patience and even tenderness, has gradually brought the vines back to life.
Most of them were purchased in a state of semi-abandonment or had been completely neglected. "More than half of them had not been farmed for four to eight years and most of them had faults, but we saw their potential and decided to recover this heritage", explains Teresa, as we walk through Bascois, a plot with slate soils at 800 metres elevation in Carballeda with gobelet vines over 100 years old and spectacular views of the valley. Planted almost half to Mencía, the vineyard also produces Merenzao, Brancellao, Sousón, Garnacha Tintorera, Ferrón and other red and white varieties.
The first vintage of Bascois, 2019, was released recently but in order to make wine from its grapes, Teresa, Luis and Hugh had to spend countless hours in the vineyard weeding, pruning and composting plant by plant to get it to bud again. Assuming there are no setbacks, pruning can be done three years later thus obtaining the first vintage from a century-old plant. "It is hard work, but the thrill of recovering and bringing a vineyard like this forward is worth the effort,” say the members of O Cabalín, who farm with artisanal methods and work organically since the beginning.
According to the land registry, all their plots date from 1910 to 1929, but they were probably planted earlier, Teresa points out. This could be the case of Caidó, a beautiful site down the hill from Bascois with wild boar tracks in the soil ("they destroy rather than eat", says Teresa) and a derelict dovecote, which they also want to rebuild, and where they are recovering several parcels of land. A new red called A Valigota will soon be released from these vines, and perhaps there will be more wines in the future. "At first we struggled to find vines, but we get quite a few offers now; most of the winegrowers around here are old," Teresa says. " We are now producing 10,000 bottles and we are still buying vines, but our ceiling is 15,000 or 20,000 bottles at the most".
In 2015 and 2016 they vinified some experimental barrels, but their wines were not released until 2017. Since 2020 their wines are made at their own winery in Villamartín de Valdeorras, a charming wood and slate building that used to be the village's old winery and was lovingly and tastefully restored by the trio. "It is a village of nurseries, but slate is the main industry,” explains Teresa, who lives in O Barco, the area’s main town, more or less halfway between the vineyards and the winery.
Encouraged by their close friend Raúl Pérez, they started out with two wines. Slowly but surely they attracted the interest of some distributors and when it all seemed to be taking off, Covid came along and brought everything to a halt. In the summer of 2022, and with the worst of the pandemic already behind them, a devastating fire in the region, in the midst of a severe heatwave, destroyed as much as 10,000 hectares of vineyards, crops, chestnut trees and woodland, even crossing the river Sil and surrounding towns such as O Barco.
For the O Cabalín trio, the fire, whose scars are still clearly visible, caused a considerable reduction in their yields, already affected by the drought and spring frosts in 2022. "We will only release 5,000 bottles of that vintage because we lost half a hectare. We do have a barrel of red from one of the vineyards in the area that burnt down; we’ll see what comes out of it.”
O Cabalín (1,500 bottles, €27) lends its name to the project and was the first red wine they bottled. It is a field blend of Mencía with 20% Garnacha Tintorera and small quantities of other red varieties planted in different plots in O Cabalín, a south-facing slope at 560-600 m elevation that, according to Luis Peique, usually ripens 10 to 15 days earlier than the north-facing slope. Like the rest of the wines, the grapes are harvested by hand early in the morning by pickers wearing head torches so that the fruit arrives fresh at the winery. Then, in the case of O Cabalín, Teresa stomps the grapes with her feet before fermenting them in seasoned 500-litre barrels with 35%-40% stems in the 2019 vintage, the current one on the market. Subsequently, the wine, which is juicy and has ripe fruit notes, is aged in the same barrels for 16 months.
A Espedrada (1,600 bottles, €26) also comes from several plots on this slope.This Godello from hundred-year-old vines has elegant oxidation notes, a hint of salinity and toasted nuances, but at the same time it is delicate and full-bodied. Intended to be a wine to lay down, it is macerated with the skins in stainless steel tanks for 48 hours and fermented and aged on its lees in 500-litre barrels for 12 months without batonnage. Surprisingly, the first vintage (the current one is 2020) did not meet the DO quality criteria because the wine's toasted notes and a touch of volatility (which Teresa, Luis and Hugh liked) were seen as a "lack of typicity.”
The 2018 vintage was the first for Viladequinta (1,000 bottles, €27), a red blend of Mencía, Merenzao and Garnacha Tintorera from three northeast-facing plots in the family's village at 750m elevation. Fermented and aged in 500-litre and 225-litre barrels for 14 months, it is an expressive and fragrant yet serious wine, with mineral notes, elegance and very good complexity on the palate.
The latest wine on release is Bascois (500 bottles, €32), the first vintage from their highest plot in Carballeda, across the valley, with poor slate soils. Deep and complex but without losing freshness, Bascois is a field blend of Mencía (40%) with other red varieties. Clusters are left on around 30% to 40% of the grapes, which are foot-trodden. The rest of the grapes are destemmed without crushing and the wine is aged for 12 months in 225-litre barrels.
As tradition dictates, Teresa and her partners make tostado (a naturally sweet wine made from clusters of grapes left to dry in well-ventilated places for a maximum of three months) for their own consumption. In a decidedly less orthodox way, and purely for fun, they make a white wine with a veil of flor, sherry style, which they are letting rest to see how it evolves.
In the meantime, slowly but surely, Hugh, Teresa and Luis -plus David, the couple's son, who lends a hand when he can- are continuing, vine by vine, to undo the path to recovering a small corner of the traditional vineyard landscape in Valdeorras.
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