“He is one of the best winemakers in Spain and his experience and professionalism will allow us to consolidate our position as one of the reference wineries in Ribeira Sacra, Galicia and Spain”. With these words, Manuel Bellod, owner of Pazo de La Cuesta, introduced Luis Buitrón, the new winemaker and technical director of the oldest family winery in Galicia.
The president of the Spanish Federation of Winemakers since 2021, Luis Buitrón, joins the team of the winery from Lugo, located in Ribas de Sil, which dates back to the 16th century. “I face this new stage in Pazo de La Cuesta with great enthusiasm. It is a well-established project with great potential, in which I have full confidence, and with which great things can be done. The main objective is that the winery, of great importance in Galicia’s wine heritage, becomes a regional and national reference. A great effort has been made to recover native varieties such as brancellao, dominant in the area before phylloxera. It is a grape with great freshness and its own identity, which adapts very well to the tastes of increasingly demanding consumers, and, therefore, these are qualities that make it unique. The Garnacha Tintorera is also being recovered, whose vines were imported from Bordeaux (France) in the 19th century by the family that owned the pazo and have managed to survive to the present day. The whites, which use the four Galician queen varieties -godello, loureira, treixadura and albariño- have a very defined personality and we will continue working along this path”, said the new winemaker and technical director of Pazo de La Cuesta, Luis Buitrón.
Buitrón has a great career in the wine world and brings more than thirty years working as a winemaker of well-known wineries in Galicia, Asturias, and Castilla y León.
Since 2020, Pazo de La Cuesta has been immersed in a project of renovation and recovery of its historic vineyard and the restoration of the primitive winery of the sixteenth century. Pazo de La Cuesta has belonged to the same family since its foundation and it has been, precisely, Manuel Bellod, who is part of the fourteenth generation, the one in charge of starting, in 2020, this initiative assuming the commitment to return the prestige of yesteryear to the pazo, its vineyard and its wines.
