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Tim Atkin MW: Patience versus haste

Even the best wineries in the world get things wrong sometimes. I remember talking to the team at Tempos Vega Sicilia, the producer that topped the 2024 Liv-Ex Power 100, after the 2023 harvest in Rías Baixas, when they were all set to produce the first vintage of Deiva. Their designs were delayed by a virulent attack of mildew – endemic in this part of Galicia – that wiped out the crop in their Condado do Tea vineyards. They treated too late; they lacked experience; they acted on the wrong advice. In short, they screwed up.

And yet, in most other ways, Vega’s approach to its new venture has been a study in composure, modesty and professionalism. I’ve had a front-row seat to watch the team in action over the past few years and it’s been an object lesson in how to craft a world-class wine from scratch. Other wineries would have arrived in Galicia with enormous fanfare, but not Vega. It’s all been impressively sotto voce. They have listened and observed.

Vega started by acquiring vineyards in the best bits of the Salnés Valley and Condado do Tea sub-regions through an intermediary, Guillermo Alvarado, in 2018, realising that nothing pushes up prices faster than the news that a rich buyer is interested. The next stage was to taste the best wines in the region – repeatedly and blind – to understand the different faces of Albariño as well as the many terroirs of Rías Baixas.

Beginning experimentation

In 2020, Gonzalo Iturriaga and his team made their first wines. Then they started to experiment with different picking dates and fermentation vessels, quietly searching for a style that was all their own. How does concrete affect Albariño? What about stainless steel, foudres or granite eggs? Does malolactic fermentation enhance typicity or detract from it?

Four vintages later, the first release of Deiva is complete, although it won’t be released until January 2027. That patience thing again. Is it good? Indeed, it is. In fact, it’s exceptional, one of the greatest whites ever produced in the region. The quality of the 2024 was a bonus, but this is a brand built on the gradual accumulation of knowledge.

Vega’s approach contrasts dramatically with that of Gérard Perse, the former owner of Château Pavie in Saint Emilion, who passed away recently at the age of 75. Perse was a controversial, even divisive figure. His 2003 vintage – ripe, figgy and very concentrated – engendered a famous war of words between Jancis Robinson MW and Robert Parker, then in his pomp as the most influential Bordeaux critic in the world.

Perse represented many things I admire. He was born into a poor family in Paris, one of nine children, left school at 15, set up his own fruit and vegetable shop five years later and his first supermarket when he was 25. He was hard-working, ambitious, self-made and very successful. Under his stewardship, Château Pavie was promoted to Grand Cru Classé A status in 2012. Whatever you think of the wine – I agree with Jane Anson’s view that, at one point, it came to “represent the excess that I find so difficult about Saint Emilion” – there was no denying the investment Perse put into the place or his determination to be among Bordeaux’s top châteaux. Jane tells me that the wine is better balanced these days.

Patience did not feature among Perse’s character traits, however. Within months of arriving at Château Pavie, he ordered the maître de chai to destroy a substantial part of the château’s archives. He also bulldozed the old buildings and replaced them with a vast, marble-clad palace. Perse was once overheard in a restaurant saying that “before me, Château Pavie did not exist”. This of a terroir that probably dates back to Roman times.

Which approach produces better results? That of Vega Sicilia or Gérard Perse? No doubt both have their supporters. But I’m reminded of a quote by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.” We overlook the past at our peril.