| 93+ |
View from the Cellar |
The Finca Luna Beberide is planted with sixty-plus year-old Mencía vines, on the same soil mixture of slate, chalk and clay as the regular bottling from this fine estate. The wine is aged in a mix of new and used French oak barrels. The older vines give a more precise and complex bouquet, offering up scents of cassis, pomegranate, graphite, slate minerality, pepper, French roast, cigar smoke and a discreet framing of cedary oak. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, mineral-driven and tangy, with a superb core of fruit, excellent focus and grip, ripe, fine-grained tannins and a long, complex and vibrant finish. This is outstanding juice. I would opt for giving it some time in the cellar to let its tannins fade away a bit, but it is so well balanced that drinking it in its youth is hardly a chore! 2028-2075.
John Gilman - Issue #105 May/June 2023. |
 |
| 93+ |
The Wine Advocate |
The perfumed, elegant and harmonious 2021 Finca Luna Beberide is serious and balanced. It feels young and energetic. This is now a vino de paraje from Valdetruchas in Villafranca del Bierzo, and it matured in barrel for 10 months. It has notes of flowers, herbs and wild berries with a touch of smoke and spice. It's fresh and balanced, with 13.5% alcohol. 50,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in January 2023. The Luna Beberide family has been producing modern Bierzo wines since 1988. They work over 50 hectares of vineyards and bottle around 150,000 bottles per year. Paixar was one of the first icons from Bierzo.
Luis Gutierrez – The Wine Advocate August 10, 2023 |
|
| 93 |
Wine Review Online |
I know this producer very well, having conducted one full visit and two fairly brief ones, including a brief one earlier this year. Four bottlings of Mencía are released, and this is the second one up, with a label that was formerly called “Finca La Cuesta,” or so it seems by appearance and placement in the lineup. That detail hardly matters, as this 2021 rendition is wonderfully open and delicious, without seeming overly developed, fruity or obvious in any way. That is not an easy result to achieve with any grape variety — Mencía included. Indeed, I can’t recall ever experienced this wine showing such complexity and completeness at this early stage in any previous vintage. Classic black cherry fruit scents and flavors form the core, as one would expect from this variety, but there are little flickers of red and blue fruits as well, and just the most subtle touch of oak imaginable (by which I mean, a suggestion more of oxygen interchange from a semi-porous vessel rather than just steel tanks). Savory notes are already emerging alongside the fruit, yet this doesn’t seem in danger of cracking up anytime soon. Any danger posed by this wine is to 95% of the $30 Pinot Noir around the world, which is easily bested by this wine, which is roughly similar in weight to most New World renditions but more complex and more versatile with food. Yes, that’s a big statement. Try the wine and put me to the test on this.
Michael Franz – Oct 10, 2023. |
|
Finca Luna Beberide