Falcoeira "A Capilla"
Outsiders preserving a legacy
Discomfort is a powerful creative tool and a means to test your limits. In the wine world, discomfort can take the form of arriving in a far off place and, rather than sticking to what you know, immersing yourself in a whole new culture, understanding its practices and taking on the challenge of preserving the tradition, even though it is not your own.
Two friends, Telmo Rodríguez and Pablo Eguzkiza, took this “route of discomfort” as a means to creating special wines, two men passionate about winemaking, who fate decided to bring together to create singularity in liquid form.
Accustomed to traveling around Spain in search of unique spots, the duo strives to learn from the different local cultures, to bottle and preserve them. One of these trips, to Falcoeira de Santa Cruz, in Valdeorras (Galicia) in the mid-90s, was later to be the start of a “story of the impossible” that has been continuing for 15 years. The “discomfort” of replanting vineyards abandoned 8 or 9 decades ago, the difficulty of adapting the vineyards (difficult to work due to their secluded location) to human intervention, the minuscule production of just over 3,000 kilos of grapes per year from three hectares of vines planted in slate soil.
But their determination to revive the culture of the land was greater than the vintages that they produced but never released. The duo never gave up, they revived the traditional style of production, swimming against the current, putting their faith in the traditional native grape of an area in the Galicia region that had already become used to the non-native varieties after the devastation wrought by Phylloxera at the turn of the last century.
In 2012, after countless tests, which resulted in a number of unlabelled bottles from 5 vintages that would never see the market, they finally said yes. The first and, for now, only vintage of Falcoeira produced 900 bottles of red wine (originally intended to be white) that reflect the traditional production methods and the hard toil in the “uncomfortable” vineyards.
The difficult thing is not so much to make wine, but to extract the soul of the terroir and to do so using traditional techniques, preserving an entire wine culture, despite it not being your own, and thereby creating a legacy. When they first arrive in a new area they study the traditional methods, not wishing to depart from tradition or an artisanal view of winemaking. They go to the area in question, they listen to the terroir and try to understand it. They also strive to understand the surrounding environment and create an understanding of equals. Falcoeira is a co-plantation of native varieties including Mencia, Sousón and Godello, brought together to preserve an identity, a beginning, an origin. The nose shows the maturity of south-facing vineyards, jammy red and black fruit, with additional complexity imparted by the slate soil. The palate is immense, the type that does not leave you indifferent and distinguishes a good wine from a great wine. Chin chin!
