The Word That Points Forward

Some wine names describe what is in the bottle. This one begins with a word about leaving.

Ultreia was a greeting on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Raúl Pérez describes it as the Latin word pilgrims used to one another, meaning, roughly, forward, or let’s go further. It was a word for the middle of a journey, said on the way to somewhere else.

In 2003 it became the name of his first project of his own.

As a choice, it reads like a statement of intent. Pérez was born in Valtuille, a village in the Bierzo, in the north-west of the province of León. His beginnings in wine are tied to his family and to Castro Ventosa, the family winery in the same village. Setting out alone is, by definition, a step beyond that. The name said as much.

But the name did not stay a direction only. On one of the wines that carries it, a second word sits beneath the first: Valtuille.

The word points forward. The label points home.

Ultreia Valtuille is made from Mencía from old vines, more than ninety years old according to the producer, in the area of Villegas, in Valtuille de Abajo. The soils are clay and limestone, with sand on the surface. The bunches go into wooden vats whole, stems included, for a long maceration, and the wine is bottled without fining or filtration. The producer’s notes add that Pérez does the fieldwork on these vines himself: the pruning, the ploughing, the harvest.

So the wine named after a word for going further comes from vines that have stood in the same ground for most of a century, in the village he comes from.

In the Bierzo, putting a village on a label is not a neutral act. In recent years the region has created categories that let wines name their village and, beyond that, a single named site, a paraje. Valtuille de Abajo was prominent among the first wines put forward under them. To write Valtuille on a bottle is to claim that the village deserves attention, not only the grape.

Read together, the two words pull in opposite directions. One is movement; the other is origin. One belongs to people passing through; the other to vines rooted in the same place for generations.

The word points forward. The label points home.