Description
About Candea
When the The grungy frontier town of Verín on the Spanish/Portuguese border isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a winegrower whose peers hold up as one of the most influential Spanish vignerons of his era. And yet it was here, amid the quirky mishmash of industrial and medieval streets that we first found José Luis Mateo delivering a few cases of his wine to his family’s café/bar, A Canteira.
Luis Gutiérrez once described the wine that was being delivered as “the best house wine I’ve ever tried in a restaurant”. The comment is spot-on, so much so that we are busy trying to convince JLM to make some for us. But that’s another story.
Given the relative anonymity of Muradella’s wines on the world stage, Mateo’s key role in the renaissance of Spanish wine—and Galicia in particular—may surprise local readers. Regardless, the artisanal, vineyard driven model of winegrowing that Mateo has followed over the last 20+ years in the wild, remote terroirs of Monterrei on the edge of Galicia has blazed a trail that many of northern Spain’s new breed of exciting and dedicated wine growers have been able to follow. Just as the cream of young French winegrowers studied and tried to emulate the work of Selosse, Foucault, and Dagueneau, a good number of their Spanish counterparts looked towards this secluded corner of Galicia for their inspiration.
The characteristics that made Mateo stand out so starkly at the height of Spanish viticulture’s industrial revolution is why he is such a cherished resource for today’s new wave vignerons. His early adoption and refinement of the methods of his forbears, and his almost pathological love affair with this region, its terroirs and its local (pre-phylloxera) grape varieties, were way ahead of their time. Algueria’s Fernando González Riveiro credits Mateo as saving Merenzao (aka Bastardo and Jura’s Trousseau) from extinction in Galicia. This from a grower who makes the best Iberian Merenzao we have tasted! Mateo’s faith in biodynamic farming practices to rehabilitate the health of the region’s neglected vineyards was also well ahead of the curve, as were his vineyard-specific wines that started appearing decades ago. As you might expect, his wines are realised without the aid of added yeasts, made with very low sulphur and are not filtered.
For a one-man ‘cottage industry’, Mateo makes a sizable range of terroir-specific wines, each in tiny batches, ranging from a few-hundred cases to the contents of a single barrel. As Mateo continues to peel back layers from his terroirs, new cuvées pop up and experiments come and go with only the fittest wines surviving to make a second vintage. With such an array of vineyard sites and a dizzying assortment of grape varieties, condensing the range in a few words is easier said than done, but we’ve tried below. The single varietal wines – made from Caiño, Mencía and Sousón amongst others, are nothing if not a paean to this vine-shepherd’s love affair with his region and its local grapes.
