A producer with great influence on the new generation of Spanish winemakers, Raúl Pérez was born in Valtuille de Abajo, a small village in Bierzo where his long-standing grape-growing family manages the Castro Ventosa winery.
His fame stems in no small part from the fact that the doors of his winery have always been open to newcomers in Bierzo, starting with Álvaro Palacios himself. He has also helped many established names in Galicia like Forjas del Salnés in Rías Baixas and Algueira and Guímaro in Ribeira Sacra encouraging them to focus on local grapes and terroir-driven wines.
Despite his traditional training, Pérez has gradually eschewed winemaking orthodoxy to capture and bottle the essence of the vineyards and soils he works with. In his reds, he seeks the most suitable maturation and maceration times for each site. His wines are usually field blends of Mencía (it is standard to find Alicante Bouschet, Bastardo, Palomino, Dona Blanca, Godello or Malvasía mixed in the vineyards in Bierzo) and are fermented with stems unless the grapes have been dehydrated.
He claims to have found a balance between early harvesting and long macerations (two to five months). This allows him to preserve acidity, extract tannins gently and polymerize them through natural oxygenation in oak. Pérez no longer uses cooling devices in his winery and his wines are aged either in foudres or used barrels. In recent times, he has been using flor (a veil of yeasts) in his winery in Ponferrada to gain complexity and to protect the wines naturally during the ageing process to avoid adding sulphur.
As for the whites, Pérez shuns ultraclean musts and cooling devices; instead, he relies on yeasts and microbiology. “I like to work with the freedom of not knowing how the wines are going to smell,” he says.
One of a kind
Born in 1973, Raúl Pérez began working in the family winery, but in 2003 he set out on his own in Bierzo. The name he chose was Ultreia (“let’s go further”, in Latin), the spirited salute exchanged among pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. In 2010 he regained control of Castro Ventosa and in 2011 he launched La Vizcaína, also in Bierzo, in partnership with his nephew César Márquez. Márquez is now in charge of Castro Ventosa but Pérez continues to oversee the blends.
In addition to consulting for many producers across Spain, particularly in their early stages, he oversees winemaking at Tilenus in Bierzo. Since its purchase by MG Wines, Pérez also advises other wineries in the group in Spain’s southeast.
Backed since the late 2010s by a group of investors, he has expanded in Bierzo with the construction of a new winery in Valtuille de Abajo that can handle 400,000 litres. This has enabled Pérez to increase production of his entry-level red, Ultreia St.-Jacques (€12 in Spain).
Alongside Ultreia and La Vizcaína, Pérez's flagship projects, he haslaunched Valdecañada, which focuses on the Ponferrada area, and Viariz, made from vineyards in the hamlet of the same name —one of the highest in Corullón.
Ultreia
Ultreia wines are generally sourced from Valtuille de Abajo. The exceptions are Ultreia Godello (40,000 bottles, €14), and Ultreia red, which are heavily influenced by grapes from Cacabelos and Ponferrada respectively. The rest of the range comprises lieu-dit and single-vineyard wines, with production ranging from a few hundred bottles to just over 5,000. Ultreia Valtuille (€48), the red wine that launched the project, comes from Villegas, a site with distinctive sandy soils. A limited selection from the most markedly sandy area was later released as Ultreia Villegas (€80).
Another flagship wine in the Ultreia range is El Rapolao, the coldest site in Valtuille de Abajo, with a slightly steeper slope and clay-ferrous soils. Pérez encouraged several fellow producers to create their own versions of El Rapolao, just as it is done in Burgundy. Meanwhile, the DO Bierzo developed and adopted a classification system for village, lieu-dit and single vineyard wines. Despite being a pioneer of single-vineyard wines and granting the DO the use of site names that he had registered as trademarks, Pérez has opted to remain independent and has not joined the new classification.
A rising star from Valtuille de Abajo is Ultreia La Vitoriana (€85), a vineyard with clay, stone and quartz soils that Pérez has been producing separately since 2019, using what are arguably the oldest vines in the village. Pérez also produces a single-vineyard white wine called Ultreia La Claudina (€45) from a sandy vineyard in Valtuille de Abajo.
Other projects in Bierzo
Founded in 2011, La Vizcaína was established to highlight the differences between sites within the Valtuille de Abajo vineyard. With yields ranging from 4,000 to 10,000 bottles per wine and prices under €30 in Spain, the range includes one white wine, La del Vivo, and four red wines: La Vitoriana, El Rapolao, La Poulosa and Las Gundiñas. While the latter two sites have clay soils, La Poulosa ripens earlier than Las Gundiñas, which is a cooler area.
Viariz was launched following the acquisition of several vineyards from Descendientes de J. Palacios in the hamlet of the same name in Corullón. This remote, mountainous, elevated area (up to 1,045 metres) is characterised by small plots perched on steep slopes over clay and slate soils. Spanish businessman Alfonso Carrascosa is also involved in the project. The range includes two red wines with very limited production and high prices. The aim is to craft ethereal, delicate wines without sacrificing complexity. Viariz (€175) is sourced from the middle and lower slopes, while the upper vineyards are reserved for La Muria (€550).
Valdecañada explores the vineyards of Ponferrada, once the main wine-growing area in Bierzo before phylloxera. With elevations ranging from 600 to 840 metres, the area has slate soils and northern exposures. Pérez describes the wines as more acidic and less tannic and says they need more ageing. This means the wines can spend up to 24 months in barrels. Production is also very limited, ranging from just over 2,000 bottles of the main red Valdecañada (€55) to barely a couple of barrels of El Cerro de Valdecañada (€130), which comes from higher-elevation vineyards, and Petra. The latter was originally part of the Ultreia range, but due to its location in the Ponferrada area, it is now included in this project.
Other regions
Other remarkable wines made by Raúl Pérez beyond Bierzo include Sketch (€58, 1,500 bottles, some of which are aged under the sea), an Albariño sold as table wine and made at Forjas del Salnés, the winery of Rodrigo Méndez in Rías Baixas. Rául and “Rodri”, who also run a joint project in Ribera Sacra called Castro Candaz, often describe themselves as two good friends who enjoy making wine. As they say, “friendship makes wines flourish.”
Pérez makes two additional single-vineyard reds in this Galician region, this time at Adegas Guímaro: La Penitencia (“the penitence”, 900 bottles, €70,) and El Pecado (“the sin”, 1,200 bottles, €78,) with grapes sourced from Pombeiras and Capeliños vineyards respectively.
Pérez has also ventured onto Leon's high plateau, at almost 1,000 metres elevation, to work with local grape varieties. Under the Arrotos del Pendón brand, he produces a white wine from Albarín and a red wine from Prieto Picudo. Prices are more affordable at around €18, and each wine yields around 10,000 bottles.
In 2022, Pérez and his group of investors acquired Domaines Lupier in Navarra.