Native yeast fermentation with 30% stems in an open vat with daily foot treading, then aged for 10 months in stainless steel tank. (22mg/L sulfur)
Production: 100 magnum bottles
Adega Sernande is a project born of friendship between Ribeira Sacra natives Maria Aira Pumar and Antonio Lopez Casas and Gredos
Vigneron Orly Lumbreras. The trio met at a natural wine event in Galicia, where Orly was showing his wines. They kept in touch, they became good friends, and they succeeded in launching an incredible project together. Orly has a strong connection to Galicia, having spent a formative decade living in Santiago de Compostela before moving with his young family to Madrid, where he discovered the world of natural wine. After working alongside Alfredo Maestro in the austere mountain village of Navarredondilla, Orly fell in love with Grenache and the Sierra de Gredos and decided to pursue a second career in winemaking
(he is a sound engineer by training). Orly admits, however, to obsessing over Galicia's intense landscapes as he developed his point of view as a winemaker; he yearned to interpret the Ribeira Sacra's characterful local varieties. In 2014, when Maria and Antonio invited him to make a wine together from their vertiginous parcel of Mencia on the edge of the River Sil, he jumped at the chance.
The project takes its name from the village of Sernande, where the trio built out a small winery in an old stone house in time for the 2018 vintage. The heart of Adega Sernande is the historic winemaking village of Vilacha de Salvadur (to the east of Sernande), which is home to an impressive twelfth-century industrial park of sorts, consisting of 44 small stone bodegas on the north bank of the River Sil, clustered together in a forest by a stream. A sharp hook downhill from this ancient winemaking communityleads to an epic panorama of slate and schist terraces of vines, stacked straight up from the shores of the Sil. This is the steep, swirling vista that gave Orly Lumbreras vertixe ("vertigo" in Gallego) the first time he visited Vilacha.
Maria's father used to have a winery in the area and her brother farms the family's vines. Her razor-sharp palate quickly became the guide for Adega Sernande's aesthetic. Antonio is a relentless vineyard sleuth, scouring the Ribeira Sacra's legendary twists and turns for hidden vineyard gems that the Sernande team can adopt, explore, and interpret. The results are sensitive micro- vinifications that reveal layers of this region through an exciting new lens.
