Luna Beberide, Paixar 2021
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97
Wine Advocate
The vino de paraje from A Serra in Dragonte 2021 Paixar is as good as ever, with the austerity of the slate slopes and the old vines that deliver low yields of concentrated and characterful grapes. It has a moderate 13.5% alcohol and a very fresh sensation on the palate beyond analysis. The vineyards are in the process to obtain organic certification. 6,500 bottles produced. This is one of the most elegant vintages for this wine.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.
I have been fortunate to taste and review almost every vintage of Paixar since the first release from the 2021 vintage. Long-time readers of Wine Review Online know that I love this wine, and I love it still, but for different reasons than in some great past vintages such as, say 2004 — which may be my favorite of all. The wine has become lighter in sheer weight, with less overt wood, and both of these will be changes for the better in the view of many tasters. However, this very old vine site at high elevation in the little village of Dragonte always seems to provide abundant acidity, so the richer, riper vintages have always been successful. Be that as it may, my job is not to quibble over stylistic decisions but to evaluate wines as they result from whatever the winemaker has decided, and this is certainly a delicious and very interesting wine. Showing a bright character in a medium-bodied profile, this offers up a broad range of aromas and flavors based on fruit tones both red and black, with specific notes recalling red cherries and raspberries, ripe but still tart cranberries, black Bing cherries, and boysenberries (which grow all over my neighborhood — I’m not making this up). The overall balance of fruit, acidity, oak spice, and tannin is indisputably outstanding.
As I have mentioned in the past, Paixar is Luna Beberide’s oldest vine cuvée, with these Mencía vines ranging from eighty-five to one hundred years of age! The vineyard is a south-facing hillside of weathered slate and the wine is now raised entirely in one wine casks during its élevage. The 2021 Paixar is a superb wine in the making, delivering a complex aromatic constellation of black raspberries, graphite, pomegranate, tree bark, grilled meats, a gorgeous base of slate minerality, espresso, woodsmoke and a touch of cedary oak. On the palate the wine is deep, fullbodied and very elegant on the attack, with a superb core of black fruit, impressive transparency and grip, ripe, fine-grained tannins and impeccable balance on the long, focused and complex finish. This is so well-balanced that it is not hard to drink today, but in reality, this is still a young wine and it is infanticide to even contemplate drinking it now, as there is so much more to unfold here with some extended cellaring. This may well be the finest young wine I have yet tasted from Luna Beberide, and I have been a fan of this fine Bierzo estate for a decade now! 2031-2075+.
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