'The 2022 Doad Lousas is the second vintage of the village red. It comes from gneiss and schist soils from the traditional zone of the Sil and is warmer and riper, a textbook example of ripe Mencía fruit, an earlier zone with juicy wines. As with the rest of the 2022s, I tasted the wine after it had been blended and the sulfur adjusted, waiting in stainless steel to be bottled in a couple of months. It has the textbook floral and perfumed nose, quite fruit-driven, juicy and tasty, with some fine tannins that need a bit of time in bottle to get polished. They expect to fill some 3,300 bottles from a number of barrels of different sizes.

The wines from Envínate, one of the most dynamic projects in Spain, are increasingly sought after in international markets. So, from now on, I will start tasting the wines every 12 months, giving a preview of the unbottled wines from the last harvest and the bottled ones in the market. From Ribeira Sacra, it's the bottled 2021s and the 2022s in barrel, two very different harvests. There are two new village wines from 2021, a vintage with good yields again. 2021 is a cool, classical vintage that shows quite transparently the character of the places, while the 2022s are a little rounder and more immediate, even if they ended up being much fresher than initially expected. 2020 was an earlier harvest (2017 was the earliest ever). In 2022, they started early, and in 2023 they started early too but then it was a long harvest because they had to stop because of the rain.'

94-95/100 Luis Gutierrez-Wine Advocate