Who are we?

We created vinosLOF as a family project that began when our generation, the Lopez and Folgueral generation (surnames that give rise to the project’s initials), decided to focus on producing quality wines from the family vineyards.

Our vineyards are primarily located in Valtuille de Abajo, mostly over 80 years old, and planted with local varieties by the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents.

Our parents have been part of the project’s origin, mainly dedicating themselves to selling grapes to other wineries and maintaining and expanding the vineyards with new plantings, purchases, and exchanges in different areas of Valtuille.

In addition, to the vineyards in Valtuille, we have also started a project in recent years to recover and transform century-old vineyards in Villalibre de la Jurisdicción, saving them from abandonment and grafting part of them to varieties such as Godello, Merenzao, or “Pan y Carne,” while maintaining Mencía as the queen variety of Bierzo.

For a few years now, we have decided to restore the family winery of our grandfather, a small winery with traditional architectural style, while also renovating a historic winery in the village, the Penoselo family winery. In these projects, our philosophy is “putting the vineyard in the bottle, inside and out,” transforming each of the family plots into wines with unique terroir and varietal identity.

We work in the winery in an artisanal manner, with minimal intervention to reduce additives in our wines as much as possible so that they can faithfully represent the landscapes and plots from which they originate. We strive to gradually understand and interpret each of the sites, most of which we craft separately, giving rise to our wines.

As viticulturists, we aim for the greatest balance and sustainability of the vineyards, which we consider our greatest treasure, practicing organic viticulture based on soil treatment with plowing, cover crops, and ecological phytosanitary practices, trying to maintain biodiversity and preserve the vineyards for future generations.

As a small family winery, we are entirely dedicated to the process, and in our project, you will find curious things we have done in an artisanal manner, such as restorations, tanks, and even machinery that we use in our wineries.

We invite you to explore our website, contact us if you want to visit, buy some of our wines, seek information, or wish to represent us in another region or country and include our wines in your portfolio.

In the different sections of our website, we delve into the details.

Our vineyards

In the LOF family, we work exclusively with our own vineyards, mostly in Valtuille de Abajo, although a significant part of our vineyards are located in Villalibre de la Jurisdicción.

Our vineyards, like most of the vineyards in El Bierzo, are living treasures due to their age. Visiting El Bierzo and our vineyards will immerse you in one of the areas in the world with the largest amount of old vineyards by extension, and our family is no exception.

Our old vineyards have planting dates ranging from the 1900s to the 1940s. Of course, the new generations carry on the family legacy and have continued to plant some new vineyards.

Most of our vineyards in Valtuille de Abajo consist of small plots in a fragmented environment distributed across different landscapes in the vinous heart of the village, covering different altitudes, orientations, and soils, making each of our plots potentially a unique wine, a fragment of our villas, with its own identity.

In the following map, you can see a detailed distribution of our vineyards and parcels in Valtuille de Abajo:

The Villalibre Project

Since 2018, we have been restoring abandoned vineyards in one of the mountainous areas in the south of El Bierzo at altitudes close to 700m above sea level.

The Villalibre vineyards, mainly planted in the first decade of the 1900s, have suffered greatly from abandonment in recent decades due to the small size of the plots, the aging of the owners, and the difficulty of working vineyards located on slopes with an average inclination of 32%.

In this area, we have maintained the original old vineyard where possible and replanted where the vines had died.

In the original plots, we have grafted the Godello variety, maintaining the old vines, and nearly extinct native varieties in the area, such as Estaladiña and Merenzao.

How Are Our Wines?

Our work philosophy is centered on “putting the vineyard in the bottle.” As vintners, we focus on taking good care of our vines by practicing organic farming, plowing, and clearing the soil. We use organic fertilizers and fungicides that allow us to maintain the utmost respect for our soils and plants.

Despite the challenges of organic farming in our locations, the use of mild treatments enables us to obtain the maximum potential of native yeasts and bacteria, which we use in our wines.

The cultivation of the vine is carried out manually, as is common practice in almost all of Bierzo. Pruning, green pruning, fungicide treatments, clearing, and harvesting are all processes we perform by hand to achieve the best possible quality in our grapes.

The harvest takes place between late August and October, depending on factors such as the year’s climate or the altitude of the vineyards. The harvest is always conducted by plots, separating each one so that each wine expresses the characteristics of the soil, altitude, orientation, variety, or age of the parcels that comprise it, thus achieving a vivid representation of each enclave and its unique characteristics.

In the winery, the wines are made with minimal intervention, aiming for wines that represent the true profile of the grape with minimal added products. While not fully natural wines, as we do not forgo sulfites, we minimize added products as much as possible, always seeking clean and elegant wines that can age well over time. Fermentations are mostly carried out in small stainless steel tanks.