Wine & Spirits - June 2020 - 32

enturies after the country's imperial muscles began to go slack,
there was a different efflorescence
of power and wealth, this time
due to wine. It happened, mostly,
across the mountains to the east,
along the Ebro rather than here
on the banks of the Duero. It was
in Haro, where the trains began
shipping wine to a Europe whose
vineyards had been ravaged to their roots by an American
louse called phylloxera. While the Riojanas raced to fulfill
orders from abroad, their vines not yet damaged, Don Eloy
Lecanda y Chaves, a Castillano who had trained in Bor32

WINE & SPIRITS

JUNE 2020

CHEF MARCO ANTONIO
GARCIA OF MANNIX IN
CAMPASPERO, CARVING
A QUARTER OF LECHAZO.

PHOTOS BY JOSE IGNACIO BERDON

ian, later rumored to be a Jew, in Valladolid, after setting
in motion the Spanish conquest of the Americas, without
which I would not be here, at this light, waiting to cross
the highway.

deaux, returned home with cuttings from France to plant
here, in the town of Valbuena de Duero, establishing them
on the north-facing hillside directly across the road, where,
looking to the right, hidden behind the trees, are the closest relatives of those original vines: the Hontañon block,
now 120 years old. The block was planted with a range of
23 varieties-as there was, at the time, a dispensation from
the king, allowing Vega-Sicilia to import exotic vines.
Enrique Macías, who heads up viticulture for the group
now known as Tempos Vega-Sicilia, is in the back seat of
the SUV. He knows these particular vines as intimately as
a doctor knows a longtime patient, and is working with
IMIDRA (Instituto Madrileño de Investigación y Desarrollo Rural Agrario y Alimentario) to assess their place in an
uncertain viticultural future, exploring their diverse genetic
patrimony to find a path through a changing climate. He
hopes, after propagating and planting a selection of the
most promising vines, to find, perhaps, a microvinification
that is both delicious and restrained enough in its ripeness
to clearly show the full extent of the place where it grows.
Macías has also explored ways to accommodate the vines
to soils that can be violently high in their pH, by fermenting a compost of sheep and goat manure, then mixing in
leo-nardita-ancient buried plant material that's transitioning from peat to brown coal, which, when combined with
the compost and spread on the vineyards, helps to lower
the pH around the vine roots, providing access to minerals,
particularly iron, that would otherwise be blocked.
His work allowed Gonzalo Iturriaga, who heads up wine-
making for the group, to bottle an astonishing Valbuena 5
in the ripe 2015 vintage, his first at the estate. Pablo Alvarez, the CEO of Vega-Sicilia, has the wine in the car for us
to drink with lechazo at lunch.
"We were going to take you to my favorite place, near
Valladolid," Alvarez explains, as the light changes and we
head in the opposite direction, toward the east, then south
along the high plateau. "But you already ate there yesterday." That would be El Yugo de Castilla, in Boecillo, which
Mariano García, from Bodegas Aalto, chose as his favorite
spot for lechazo.
García was director of winemaking at Vega-Sicilia for
three decades, until 1998, when he left to start new projects. He was a founding partner in Aalto a year later. "I
come here because of Albito," García told me, introducing
the chef. "He goes out to find the best lamb; if he can't
find it, he doesn't bring it. And he has a clean, lean way of
roasting lamb-it doesn't repeat after you finish." García
stood, smiling, as the chef brought the round terra-cotta
platters of lechazo to the table, and remained standing
to carve and serve the lamb. "I don't usually do this," he
said, "but I know what each of you like." He spoiled his
international guest first, assuring la tajada del pastore, the
meat on the shoulder blade, the leanest part, with the least
amount of fat, was the best part.
However meltingly sweet that lamb may have been,
delicately spiced and contrasted by a platter of maruja, a
cress-like herb that grows in slow currents of streams and
provides its own refreshingly crisp green spice, that was
yesterday's lechazo. Now, we are headed to Campaspero,
a small town with young vineyards scattered on either side
of our approach (an altitude until recently too high and too
cold for vines). At the center of town, Mannix, the lechazo

Wine & Spirits - June 2020

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