2024 Belondrade y Lurton: 'A fantastic vintage of this classic wine'

One of Spain’s great whites

It's one of Spain's great white wines, and the 2024 is a beautiful iteration. From the stony plain of Rueda comes Belondrade y Lurton. The open, windy expanses of Rueda are not an easy place to make wine, as it's freezing cold in winter and baking hot in summer. But that extreme variation is the key to white wines that combine ripeness and acidity.

The Belondrade story began in the 1990s. At the time, the Verdejo grape variety was known for making crisp, fresh whites, but hispanophile Frenchman Didier Belondrade spotted it had untapped potential. He began vinifying Rueda Verdejo with barrel fermentation and ageing, to make a white wine in the Burgundian idiom. The result was a storming success. Pretty soon, critic Robert Parker referred to Belondrade y Lurton as 'one of the two greatest dry whites being made in Spain'.

From a small start, Belondrade has built up a patchwork of some of the best vineyards in their area, all carefully mapped for soil types and aquifers. In the cellar, they maintain a scrupulous oak regime, using 4 different coopers from both Bordeaux and Burgundy. They use large 300-litre barrels, as they consider these offer the perfect surface to volume ratio of oak to wine, and they cycle out 25% of their barrels every year to maintain the balance of old and new wood.

These days, Didier's son Jean is in charge, and he and winemaker Marta Baquerizo have turned out a beautiful 2024. It was slow-ripening year, and harvest was later than usual, set against the cool nights of early autumn. That was ideal for balancing acidity and with complex aromatics. 2024 Belondrade y Lurton is tense and precise, with a bounteous peach, lime, lees and grapefruit character. As appealing as it is immediately, it also has generous ageing potential. /NT

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