D. Ventura Viñas do Burato 2021

Ventura is from the soft-spoken Ramón Losada and his family, who farm 6ha of old vines to make small amounts of single-vineyard wines in one of the most remote wine regions in the world, Ribeira Sacra. Ramón is the picture of a humble farmer, with his full-time job as the village veterinarian consuming whatever time is left after tending to his vines. He even finds a little time to raise a rare heritage breed of Galician pig, from which he makes incredible sausages to keep the breed going. In 1999, he and his sister Belen refurbished the cellar in the ancient family farmhouse in Pantón and began bottling and selling their wines, which until then were for self-consumption. Since then, they have made many fans of their honest, soulful red wines from Galicia’s rugged interior mountains. 

The Burato vineyard is located on the Miño river, north of his other two plots, which lie in the Amandi subzone. The Miño landscape is lush with a significantly cooler climate and higher average rainfall than Amandi. Streams flow directly through the vineyard on their way to the Miño when it rains. The vineyard is planted on schist soils, to mencía and merenzao (a.k.a. trousseau or bastardo), which yields crisp, refreshing red wines with mouthwatering acidity. Ramon does not use any chemicals in the vineyard nor corrections in his winery and makes the wines simply, without intervention or fancy winemaking. D. Ventura is transparent viticultor wine from Ribeira Sacra.

Vinification – After a manual harvest in small boxes, the grapes are completely destemmed, crushed, and spontaneously fermented with indigenous yeasts in temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks and bottled directly from the tank without fining or filtration.