White Wine

Belondrade

Belondrade Y Lurton 2022, 75cl

DO Rueda

Belondrade

This is the flagship wine of the winery and an icon in the Spanish wine world. This 100% Verdejo is extremely complex and requires time and air to open up, but when it does, it is a white wine like no other. It is a wine designed for aging, with a maturation potential of 6 to 8 years, during which it will reveal all its qualities.

Viticulture and Vinification: This wine comes exclusively from the manual harvest of organic grapes from our estate, Quinta San Diego. Our vineyard is a mosaic of 23 plots with different soil compositions, topographies, planting densities, orientations, and vine ages—ranging from 8 to 65 years—carefully managed to maintain controlled yields (6,100 kg/ha). The wine undergoes spontaneous fermentation and aging on lees in French oak barrels with different characteristics.

Harvest: The limited water reserves stored in the soil from the spring rains allowed the vines to withstand drought and three waves of extreme heat recorded from late spring onwards. However, they could not prevent a temporary halt in the vegetative cycle, resulting in a harvest with highly heterogeneous ripeness levels.

The 2022 harvest will go down in BELONDRADE’s history not only as the longest but also as an atypical vintage, where manual harvesting and careful selection in the vineyard and winery were key. Vinifications by harvest day and by plot reflected the great diversity of our terroir more than ever, presenting us with an unprecedented challenge in crafting the final blend.

BELONDRADE Y LURTON is the result of a meticulous assemblage, faithfully reflecting the year’s climatic conditions and the extraordinary diversity of our terroir.

Belondrade y Lurton is a masterpiece that blends tradition, terroir, and innovation, ensuring that every bottle is as special as its legacy. Extremely popular, it sells out almost instantly after release. With its unmistakable, fully orange label, it stands out not only on the shelf but also on the table. In the early years after its release, Spaniards nicknamed it “Etiqueta Naranja” (“Orange Label”), a name by which it is still recognized today.

Awards

96/100 – Guía Peñín (2022 vintage)
94/100 – DWA-score (2021 vintage)
94/100 – DWA-score (2018 vintage)
95/100 – DWA-score (2015 vintage)
92/100 – Wine Searcher – 10 Best Rueda Wines

Allergens information

Contains sulphites.

Belondrade

All great stories begin with a dream. Didier Belondrade’s was none other than to create a White Wine with a capital “W” in the land of Cervantes.

The idea germinated in 1992, when the French couple Didier Belondrade and Brigitte Lurton tasted their first Verdejo wine. Love at first sight! Making wine and the wine business were not new to them, with deep roots in Bordeaux, but this wine made them think about a new project. And in 1994, the foundation stone of the project was laid with the establishment in Nava Del Rey, a solid commitment to the Castilian plateau terroir and an indigenous grape variety: Verdejo.

And in 1996, the dream materialized with the launch of the first vintage; for the first time, BELONDRADE Y LURTON earned a place on Spain’s finest tables. Thanks to an excellent reception from critics and customers, BELONDRADE’s reputation echoed across the world. The first steps were taken in the Japanese and American markets.

Three years later, with the aim of making BELONDRADE a “Bordeaux château in Spain,” it was essential to establish the project’s foundation on a key principle: owning its vineyards. This is how Quinta San Diego began to take shape with the planting of the first four parcels: “Tomillar Grande,” “Tomillar Pequeño,” “Camino Ventosa,” and “Bodega.”

Today, BELONDRADE has 40 hectares of its own vineyards divided into 23 parcels of different sizes. This mosaic of vineyards produces very different musts depending on the type of soil of each parcel, their orientation, age, rootstocks, and clones.

BELONDRADE’s vineyard is located about 750 meters above sea level and a few kilometers from the Douro River near Tordesillas. The climate is continental with low rainfall (between 300 and 350 mm per year), characterized by long, cold winters and short, hot summers, with a large temperature difference between day and night.

The plateau soils are of Cenozoic (or Tertiary) origin; they formed about 60 million years ago and are characterized by their low organic matter content. They are mainly composed of a layer of rolled pebbles about 10 to 60 centimeters deep, a subsoil layer of clay, and a deep layer of limestone. In each of the parcels, varying percentages of rolled pebbles, sand, and clay mix, giving the musts a unique personality and style.

The planting density ranges from 1,100 to 3,300 plants per hectare, with an average yield of 30 to 35 hectoliters per hectare. 100% of the vineyard is owned by the company, with an average age of twenty-five years.

As a proponent of sustainable and environmentally friendly viticulture, BELONDRADE practices organic viticulture without herbicides or pesticides. In this way, it fosters the biodiversity present in the vineyard and moves closer to the most natural and authentic expression of the “terroir.”