Descendientes de J. Palacios

The Free Bacchus Story

Álvaro Palacios spent the late 1980s selling French oak barrels around Spain and scouting for a place to make his own. Priorat won, but Bierzo stayed with him. In 1998 he and his nephew Ricardo Pérez, just back from winemaking studies in Bordeaux, went looking for its best old vineyards. They named the bodega for José Palacios, Álvaro’s father and Ricardo’s grandfather, who died early in 2000, soon after their first harvest. Ricardo moved to Bierzo to run it and has stayed.

Bierzo is a bowl of mountains in the far north-west, between Castile and Galicia, where Atlantic and continental weather meet. Its red grape, Mencía, was long taken for a French variety brought by pilgrims; it turned out to be Portugal’s Jaen. It makes reds of medium weight and real freshness, red berries and plum with a herbal edge, and the best get compared with red Burgundy. Most of Bierzo is clay on gentle ground. Corullón, on the western edge, has the steepest slopes, the poorest slate and the highest vineyards.

The old vineyards came with other grapes growing among the Mencía, and the mix made fresher wine, so it stayed. The work is by hand or mule. Ricardo runs the place as a whole farm, with animals for manure, milk and cheese, and he talked most of the growers who sell them grapes into cutting herbicide use from 80 per cent to 10. La Faraona comes from a vineyard crossed by a geological fault and makes fewer than a hundred cases a year.

Ricardo has farmed biodynamically from the beginning, and in 2004 he translated Nicolas Joly’s book on biodynamic wine into Spanish. The certificate, though, is organic. CCL Certificación, the organic control body for Castilla y León, certifies the grapes and the winemaking, so the wines are certified organic. Demeter’s register has no record of the estate, so the biodynamics is practice rather than certification.