Prelvm Winery. The passion of a non-conformist winegrower.
June 15, 2024
Historic vineyards of Sierra de Gata, a natural wine from Extremadura of excellent quality produced by a long line of winegrowers.
Jesús Recuero, winegrower by family tradition and winemaker. He is the son, grandson and great-grandson of winemakers. Wine, for him, is culture, roots, landscape, sensitivity... elegance, aesthetics, emotion... and so many other things.
He starts his project in Villanueva de Alcardete (Toledo), where his original family vineyards and winery dating back to 1873 are located. Since 2011, he started his second project in Sierra de Gata (Cáceres, Extremadura) thanks to a family connection with this region. Here they work with about 10 hectares around the municipality of Villamiel, the highest town in this Extremadura mountain range, the northwestern tip of Extremadura bordered to the north by the province of Salamanca and to the west by Portugal.
As he would say: "Our elders already knew that wine is born in the vineyard and shows us everything that surrounds it". The varieties that make wine in the Sierra de Gata are: piñuelo (garnacha), rufete or tinto fino (tempranillo) and verdejo serrano (white rufete) and ojo de liebre (albillo). The vineyards are grown on slopes facing east and south between 700 and 900 meters above sea level, forming a very peculiar landscape of sandy and granitic soils. They concentrate the harvest in order to transport the grapes in refrigerated trucks to the winery in Toledo where the winemaking process takes place.
Starting from a certified organic farming, in the winery the treatment of the grapes is from the utmost respect to extract their full potential by fermenting with indigenous yeasts specific to each grape. For both fermentation and maturation of the wines, he plays with concrete containers, earthenware jars, used oak barrels and a lot of wisdom to intervene as little as possible (only in bottling) or directly not to add any sulfur to the wines.
From this area of Extremadura, two exclusive lines are produced under the Antier and Trasantier brands.
The first, Antier, 'The day before yesterday' refers to the return to a family past with roots in the heart of the Sierra de Gata. Here we can find two whites, two reds and a sparkling wine (about 4500 bottles of each). All this line is natural, without any addition of sulfur.
The second, Trasantier is a day before 'Antier', the return to a family past in the Sierra de Gata, a past of historic vineyards, of small plots fenced with stone, on slopes and terraces, with an average altitude of 800 meters. Under this brand we can find three wines of minimum intervention (minimum dose of sulfur in the bottling): a white, a red and a rosé. The production is about 10,000 bottles of each line.
From the knowledge of both areas has emerged a third way, original and irreverent, which is to blend grapes from Toledo and Extremadura under the (very appropriate) brand Mélangé. Wines with great authenticity and complexity that surprise. The wines are aged under a veil of flor, with no addition of sulphur and sparkling wines that follow the traditional method.
In our wine store in Dalboroque we have these unmissable references for anyone who wants to know this magnificent nor-extremeña reference of wines and also referenced in our wine club.
