An Uncorked exclusive
Mandarin and grapefruit notes with a lick of posh oak, in an elegant and vivacious style halfway between a zesty Puligny-Montrachet and a slightly lusher Sonoma Coast Chardonnay - but it's not Chardonnay at all. It's textured and energetic, and has a surprising ability to age. It is Belondrade y Lurton, and it comes from Rueda, on the open, windy expanses of Spain's Castilian plateau. It is the classiest bottle of Verdejo you are ever likely to find - and Uncorked is proud to be the exclusive UK agent.
The Belondrade story began in the 1990s. Verdejo was once used to make sherry-style oxidized wines. It had gone on to flirt with extinction, but was now enjoying a new lease of life making fresh, crisp, dry whites. Hispanophile Frenchman Didier Belondrade realized it had the distinction to go a step further; he began vinifying Rueda Verdejo with barrel fermentation and aging, to make a white wine in the Burgundian idiom. And so was born a modern Spanish classic. Robert Parker quickly called it, 'one of the two greatest dry whites being made in Spain'.
Rueda can be a pretty harsh place to make wine. In summer, temperatures can soar as high as forty degrees, while on winter nights they can drop to minus ten. But that extreme variation can be key to making white wines that combine ripeness and acidity. In the winery and cellar, the Belondrades maintain a scrupulous oak regime, using 4 different coopers from both Bordeaux and Burgundy. They use 300-litre barrels almost exclusively, as they consider these offer the perfect surface to volume ratio of oak and wine, and they cycle out 25% of their barrels every year to maintain the balance of old and new wood. These days, Didier's son Jean is running the show - and we are delighted he has chosen Uncorked to bring Belondrade y Lurton to the UK. We've been agents for Belondrade for the last three years, but this is the first time we've had enough stock to widely publicise it. /NT
Offered subject to remaining unsold
