Liberso Curioso Verdejo was born in 2015 when Miguel Angel Fernández and his friend Ignacio Hernández decided to make a different wine in the DO Rueda. Miguel Ángel is a winegrower in Pozaldez, where he has 35 hectares of Verdejo vineyards, and Ignacio Hernández is an Agricultural Technical Engineer and a graduate in Oenology from the University of Valladolid.
Apart from this training, his professional experience in the world of oenology has been forged in different wineries.
He worked in 1 winery in the DO Toro making young reds, rosés and whites, also in the DO Cigales and where he spent the most time was in the DO Ribera del Duero.
He worked on a grape harvest at Bodegas Protos, did his oenology internship at Pago de Carraovejas and for 14 years he was the field technician at Bodega Tomas Postigo.
Since 2020, Liberso has been purely personal, as Miguel Ángel decided to leave the project for personal reasons.
Returning to Liberso Curioso Verdejo, after several tests with different elaborations, they realized that the Verdejo grape variety (native to the Rueda area) was an optimal variety for making white wines with long aging, far from the young and simple wines predominant in the area.
Liberso Curioso Verdejo is a wine that is in turn the blend of many different microvinifications.
They work with the fine lees in suspension during aging, both in stainless steel tanks and in barrels. For barrel aging, they collaborate with selected French, Hungarian, and occasionally American cooperages, using exclusively new oak barrels of 225, 300, and 500 liters. The use of new barrels is intended to enhance the wine’s complexity and structure. Each barrel is vinified separately and is not blended with others until clarification, filtration, and bottling. The barrel aging period varies depending on the vintage, with the exact duration specified in each vintage’s technical sheet. After bottling, the wine rests in the cellar for further bottle aging, contributing additional complexity and finesse.
This type of “curious” production is very unique not only in Rueda but throughout Spain. Aged white wines are not very common and even less so of this quality.
This uniqueness and quality is being supported in many national and international wine competitions and guides, highlighting the “Best of Show” mention received this year at Mundus Vini, the 94 points from Decanter World Wine Awards (2021) or the probably only Grand Gold Medal received by a wine from the DO Rueda at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles (2022).
Liberso
Liberso is a curious Verdejo that comes from a blend of 18 different wines. On the one hand, 40% of Liberso is a young wine that has lain on its fine lees for more than 7 months. The rest comes from 17 individually produced wines (depending on the vintage) fermented in barrels made by an exclusive selection of american, french and hungarian coopers.
