This summer, I had the great fortune of being hosted around the Iberian peninsula from Lisbon to San Sebastián by La Luz, a Spanish and Portuguese wine importer. The Iberian peninsula is a stretch of terrain that winds along the Atlantic Ocean through dry, dusty valleys, over misty, leafy mountains, and across windswept surfing beaches.

Owned by Spanish wine expert (and former fellow wine shop owner) Kerin Bembry and Oregon winemaker John House (see Ovum and Big Salt), La Luz dedicates itself to representing one winemaker in each of its regions across the two countries, plus the Canary Islands and Azores. And, like everything on our shelves, the wines are farmed organically or biodynamically, made with deep care and minimal intervention.

The trip itself was significant, life-changing really, each of the growers and makers hosting us around their tables, feeding us, opening up bottle after bottle to satisfy our curiosity, driving us through their towns and vines, opening up their lives to our questions. We cruised down a river drinking mencia rosé, jumped in a waterfall, ate steak grilled over young grape vines, held a midnight barbecue, attended several pool parties, initiated at least three dance parties, and forged friendships that have already proven true and lasting. I recommend taking a trip with eight strangers in a foreign country if hosted by Kerin and John. 

Before setting out, I had tasted most of these wines in the shop and noted many of them in the prolific list of wines I’ve gathered over the last couple of years; however, tasting them in context was a gift wrapped in another gift—the utter deliciousness of the thing itself contained by the generosity of the families producing them. I need not proselytize the singularity of visiting the people and places that make the things you love, only impress that it changes everything. 

We have so many wines from La Luz at the shop (in fact, at least six of them have appeared on our glass list since I returned), and if you ask me, I’ll show you all of them and attempt to conjure up the dreamy landscapes and people from which they were born. —Leslie Pariseau

GAÑETA “TXAKOLINA” CATALONIA 2024

Gañeta’s labels are basically a xeroxed photograph of the winery. It’s a style typical of the region’s branding that cannot convey the misty storybook beauty of the vineyards nestled atop rolling Catalonian hills overlooking Spain’s Costa Brava about 20 miles west of San Sebastian. On the day we visited, the sun was peeking out from the clouds and the water beyond the vineyard was sparkling. It rains a little almost every day here, and for this reason the vines are susceptible to pests and mold, so are trellised on pergolas high above the ground, woven into one massive canopy beneath which you can meander, brushing your fingertips along firm bunches of Hondarrabi Zuri and Hondarrabi Beltza grapes hanging from 50-year-old vines. Looking up, the pergolas appear verdant tapestry of leaf and light. (I posted a video on IG specifically for y’all so you can see what I’m talking about.)

I would venture to guess that most of you have had at least one Txakolina by this point. New Orleans loves this category of zippy, crunchy wine bottled in green or clear long-neck bottles that suggest young, fresh liquid. So many of us were introduced to it through Ameztoi, the Getaria-based label, which has become ubiquitous with the arrival of warm weather. Getariako Txakolina is Spain’s tiniest designation created back in 1989 in order to preserve and codify a centuries-old tradition that, by the 19th-century, was in danger of being lost. Typically, the whites and rosés have a touch of effervescence (imparted by a low-temp ferment to retain C02) and simmer in the glass in the first few moments, especially if splashed from a porrón or a traditional Basque pour spout. 

Founded in 1992 by Julian Ostolaza and Itziar Etxeberria from ancestral vines and today carried on by Paula and Enaitz Ostolaza, Gañeta’s Hondarrabi Zuri is mineral, marine, and made entirely naturally. It felt necessary to introduce you to this wine because it became one of core bottles on our shelf this summer alongside its peppery rosato cousin (made from Hondarrabi Beltza), so reminiscent of Cabernet Franc—because, as it turns out, Hondurrabi Beltza is a cousin of cabernet franc. 

Let's all move to San Sebastián and go surfing every day, okay?

QUINTA DA COSTA DO PINHÃO “GRADUAL” DOURO, PORTUGAL 2022

Before visiting the vineyards, Quinta da Costa do Pinhão’s wines already felt as if they contained vital energy. Where so many Portuguese reds can be dense and brooding, QdCdP’s work feels lithe and subtle. And, of course, after rattling up a mountain in a dusty SUV to see Miguel Morais's very old vines, I am convinced the wines are spiritual. A civil engineer by trade with a quiet, cerebral vibe, insisted we witness these wild, gnarled bush vines before tasting. They looked eccentric and unkempt amid plots of neat green rows, but they are the holders of the old wisdom on this hill, some so old Miguel couldn’t be sure of the varieties. (We sell the wine made from this plot, when you are ready to explore further.) 

QdCdP has been around since the 19th century, its grapes cultivated and sold to the great Port houses, which is still true to this day. Miguel is the seventh generation to produce wines alongside his partner Filipa Silva, a magnetic, young wine shop owner who came for harvest and decided to stay to work and live with Miguel. 

This bottle, Gradual, is made of Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca, and Tinta Roriz, and bears QdCdP’s traditional labels, a literal map of this hidden corner of the Douro split into two by the Douro River. (The priestess to Miguel’s scientist, Filipa makes a B-Sides label abstracted with color and energy, the wines a response to an experimental impulse.) Like all of their cuvées, it’s foot-stomped in a big, old cement lagar, fermented partially in whole clusters, and rested in old French oak. The Gradual bursts with stewed blueberry, forest underbrush, and grippy texture. It’s wine meant for food—meaty fish, slow-cooked white beans, autumn greens, sweet peppers. In Portuguese context, ours was paired with a massive bowl of vegetables and summer beans, bathed in an herb vinaigrette, made and served by Filipa overlooking the hills of Pinhão, the light filtering through the trees, everything feeling very much alive. 

ORTO VINS “BRISAT” MONTSANT, SPAIN 2021

I drink fewer orange wines than I used to, especially when left to my own devices, so I surprised myself when the unifying thread of my enthusiasm across Spain and Portugal turned out to be tied together by skin contact bottles. Orto Vins “Brisat” is at the very top of that list. 

Orto Vins is lunar professor Joao Asens’ reflection of meticulous biodynamics and organic farming. An elven man with an air of good-natured mischief, Asens was perhaps the first to use “brisat” on a label, meaning “pomace” in Catalan and the local term for skin contact wines. (It’s since become a popular way to signify Catalonian orange.) His version is made with 80-year-old garnaxta blanca vines with eight days of skin contact and one year in barrel. We drank it sitting on a patio, the earthen walls behind us baking with heat, the wine perfectly cold, equally as golden as the light drenching that corner of Spain. 

Look forward to this one coming on our by the glass list in a couple of weeks. 

LAOSA “TRASTO ROSADO” CASTILLA Y LEÓN, SPAIN 2023

Have you ever had a wine made entirely from prieto picudo? Have you ever tasted a dozen bottles with a professor of lunar sciences on top of a hobbit mound? Have you ever danced with an old farmer and a bunch of winemakers in a cave in Spain? Me either, until I met Noelia de Paz of LaOsa in the town of Ardón in León. A winemaking town for centuries, its curving blocks are made up of large grass mounds beneath which lie subterranean caves (cuevas). Noelia’s winemaking operation lies deep under one of these mounds in an ancient multi-chamber cave that extends the depth of a whole block into the side of the hill. Truly otherworldly.

Noelia calls her self La Osa, or the bear, and her cave is strewn with dozens of bear icons, like a subterranean animistic fever dream. The effect was multiplied when, after tasting a fleet of wines from her friends and neighbors, our group walked into a neon-lit rave where we brushed shoulders with her shaggy vineyard manager still in his navy blue farmer’s coveralls. 

But we’re here for the wine: And the wine is beautiful. 100% prieto picudo, a blue-skinned grape that endures poor soils and a gripping wind that whips through this part of León, it’s lavender-salmon in color and sparks with energy or chispa as our importer guide Kerin noted with relish during the tasting. Paired with salty, toothsome local chickpeas, it was all zesty, citrus-spiked watermelon and crunchy white flower buds. 

CISTELLER “XAREL-LO” PENEDÈS, SPAIN 2022

When I tasted this wine, it was around two in the morning in the courtyard of a rambling 14th-century stone home enfolded into the shadowy hills of the Douro Valley. We’d had an epic day with Miguel and Filipa of QCdP, followed by a sunset pool party at our domaine, and a tasting with Natalia Jess of Gota (whose wines we love and carry at the shop). Natalia had prepared a true feast of fresh vegetables, salads, and grains, which we paired with two or three cases she and her husband winemaker Luis Seabra had brought along. Pedro Coelho of Pormenor stopped in with magnums of his wines, and Kerin and John had toted along bottles from all the producers we didn’t have time to visit including Cisteller, which lies south of Barcelona in Penedès, best known for Cava. 

We were deep in conversation about ghosts and the uncanny energy of some houses (i.e. the one we were sleeping in), when this bottle appeared, pure, pristine, and shining in the dark. The label was simple, a green and white stamp of a woman holding a partially woven basket; Cisteller means “basket weaver” in Catalan and refers to vigneron Sergi Canal’s family’s ancestral art. It takes some real clarity of vision to catch one’s attention at 2 a.m. post a billion bottles of wine. Made from three separate blocks of xarel-lo, the region’s limestone loving grape, fermented separately in steel, clay amphorae, and big French and Hungarian oak, it’s all mineral chalk and lemon acid, laser-focused by Sergi and his wife and fellow vigneron Jessica Madigan. 

The couple met at UC Davis studying winemaking and, for a time, became harvest nomads, zigzagging from New Zealand to the Mosel to Burgundy to Priorat, eventually returning to Sergi’s family estate in Subirats, 20 hectares of organically and regeneratively farmed land, which, in combination with their impeccable winemaking, has landed them in the Corpinnat association, 16 winemakers and growers that adhere to organic and/or biodynamic practices.