Bierzo sits in Spain's green northwest, a mountain-ringed hollow on the Camino to Santiago where the monks of the Cistercian abbey of Carracedo once tended the slopes. Mencía is its grape, grown on steep pitches of slate in a climate more Atlantic than Iberian, much of it in old parcels that survived the twentieth century through neglect rather than design.
The rediscovery dates from 1999, when Álvaro Palacios — fresh from Priorat — and his nephew Ricardo Pérez began bottling the hill parcels of Corullón. Their wines revealed a Mencía nobody expected: fragrant, mineral, fine-boned, compared sooner to Burgundy than to Rioja. Old-vine Bierzo has since become one of Spain's most distinctive reds, its village and parcel names increasingly mapped like crus.