Back at Bodega La Senda! Catching up with Diego in Bierzo

In April I returned to the town of Ponferrada in northern Spain to visit our good friend Diego Losada of Bodega La Senda. As regular customers will know, we have been working with each other for many years now which culminated in us making a wine together last year, Desgracia.

(Diego outside his cellar)

I was back in Bierzo to taste the latest wines and to work on another project that will remain secret for now! Diego had a very difficult 2023 with all sorts of adverse climatic conditions. He lost a huge percentage of his grapes so instead of making the usual individual cuvées such as Barbacana and In Absentia, he combined the healthy grapes that survived to produce a new wine Har Megiddo Tinto 2023 . In my opinion, this is one of the best Diego has made. A light to medium bodied blend of red and white juice that shows a really nice complexity of fruit, spice and earthiness. It feels stable and precise without being boring and is also amazingly priced. Out of adversity comes opportunity, apparently!

(Diego amongst his Mencia vines)

He managed to still produce small quantities of his flag ship wine 1984 2023 and his entry level Vindemiatrix 2023 as well as his unique Une Rose de Blancs 2023 which we have been serving as a chilled red in the bar to great success. We also have a small amount of his macerated Godello cuvée, In a Gadda da Vida 2023. This is a mineral driven skin contact wine with subtle stone fruit flavours.

Diego is finding new solutions and techniques to meet the environmental challenges that he has now been facing for many years. One of these is to age wines for longer in barrel and only bottle when they feel completely stable. A fine example of this is his Trousseau cuvée In Absentia 2022 which has just been released. Arguably his most complex and elegant wine, it is tasting more balanced than ever and feels like it will age very well.

We have a couple of gems hiding in the cellar too which might be impossible to find elsewhere. El Aqueronte 2018 is made from a plot of Mencia that Diego no longer has access to so it might never be made again. The same applies to Har Megiddo 2019 which is a blend of Moscatel and Malvasia that underwent 130 days of skin contact! We also have a few bottles of the aforementioned  In a Gadda da Vida 2022.

Plenty for La Senda fans or curious newcomers to explore

Happy drinking!