The 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión is «excellent in terms of aromas, sugar, and acidity»

Winemaker Andrea Obenza tells us the keys to the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión, highlighting the grapes’ aromatic intensity and balance

The harvest is the end of the grapes’ life cycle, but it is also the beginning of an equally fascinating process: winemaking. These weeks, we are carrying out the manual work of harvesting the grapes of the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión, picking each cluster with great care to ensure the perfect condition of the grapes. So we can now take stock and announce that the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión stands out for the level of aromas from the skins, balanced acidity, and optimum sugar content of grapes that are the perfect raw material for making the best Albariño.

Andrea Obenza, winemaker of our winery, has analyzed how the year has been in the vineyards that make up our property and has dissected the keys to the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión. If you want to know them, join us on this journey through the soul of our estate.

Exhaustive control of the vineyard to weather climatic instability and ward off mildew

This year’s climatology was complex, especially because spring and summer were quite unstable, alternating sunny and hot days with days ruled by clouds and marked by intermittent rains. If left unchecked, this increased humidity could lead to a higher incidence of fungal diseases in the vineyard.

For this reason, Pazo Baión’s viticulture team carried out an exhaustive and continuous control of each plot of our property throughout the year. Thus, the winery’s professionals carried out a great deal of leaf removal and ventilation work to successfully deal with the most adverse humidity conditions and prevent the appearance of the vineyard’s greatest enemy: mildew.

The result of this tireless work is that the vines grew with an optimum humidity level, and fungal diseases did not appear, so the grapes arrived healthy and in the best conditions at the ripening stage.

An ideal ripening process thanks to the alternation between heat and rainfall

Precisely, the ripening of the grapes was a crucial moment in the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión. Why? First, this stage began with weeks of scorching weather, which allowed the grapes to ripen while bathed by the sun. Did these weather conditions affect the humidity needed by the vines? Fortunately not, because they were followed by several weeks of rain, which helped to hydrate the vines and allowed «the vines to continue their ripening cycle», in the words of Andrea Obenza.

The combination of human work and the weather made for excellent vineyard management and allowed our winery’s professionals to keep the leaves of the vines in excellent condition throughout August and the first days of September, «which has helped us to facilitate the ripening of our grapes» according to the winemaker.

Grapes are in perfect health and ready to be harvested

The ripening process has brought us to the most critical moment of the year: the harvest of the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión. This harvest takes place in weeks with perfect temperatures, helping to achieve the balance sought by the Pazo Baión team in the vineyards.

As Andrea Obenza points out, the grapes harvested during the harvest are «in perfect health» and have «a very interesting aromatic intensity and perfect balance».

How can people who visit our property during these weeks appreciate that the grapes of the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión are excellent? In addition to their sense of smell, they can also understand the quality of the grapes and their optimum ripeness through their eyes. The grapes of the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión have a “yellow hue that begins to have golden notes, which indicates that they are in perfect condition to be harvested,” says Obenza.

The 3 keys to Pazo Baión’s 2023 vintage

In light of how the year has been unfolding in our vineyards, how ripening has been going, and how the harvest is progressing, Andrea Obenza gives us the three big keys to the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión: the aromas, the sugar level, and the balanced acidity of the grapes.

The aromas

The skin of the grapes, that is, their outer layer, is fundamental in the wines’ flavor and aromatic composition. In the case of the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión, the winery’s winemaker maintains that we are dealing with an intense skin.

What does this mean? The grapes will endow our wines with the intense varietal perfume already a hallmark of Pazo Baión since the skin is essential for primary aromas directly linked to the grape variety, in our case, albariño. Fruits and white flowers, citrus notes… these aromas are the key to making our Rías Baixas wines fresh and take over the nose of those who taste them.

Sugar

Grape sugars play an essential role in the wine fermentation process, as they are the fuel that feeds the wine yeast. From veraison and during ripening, the concentration of sugar increases in the grapes, which is crucial when making wine.

The 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión is characterized by excellent sugar content, according to Andrea Obenza. This will undoubtedly help our winery professionals to make outstanding vintages of Pazo Baión, Gran a Gran, and Vides de Fontán.

Acidity

If the sugar in the grapes is essential, the acidity is no less critical. The grapes from our vineyards stand out for their edge, which gives the wines from our winery vitality, personality, and freshness and allows them to ripen excellently, extending their longevity and contributing to their complexity.

How is the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión concerning the acidity of the grapes? In a word, balanced. The acidity level of the grapes has reached the perfect balance to lay the foundations for extraordinary wines.

The unique raw material of an inimitable Rías Baixas

Pazo Baión is a different winery for many reasons, but the most important of them all is linked to the origin of the grapes. Why? Our Albariños are single vineyard wines; that is, they are made only from grapes harvested in the property plots. This allows Pazo Baión’s viticulture and enology teams to carry out integral management of the grapes and to control all the details of the raw material used to make Rías Baixas wines that are pure craftsmanship.

Therefore, by discovering what the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión is like, we can predict what the wines made with the grapes we are currently harvesting will be like, even if they are months away from tasting, in the case of Pazo Baión, or more than three years away, in the case of Vides de Fontán. In other words, the information on the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión allows us to travel to the future and begin to dream of Rías Baixas, which will once again conquer our senses.

Although the work to get here has been complex and exciting, we have no time to lose. When the harvest ends, it will be time to start shaping some Albariños with five centuries of history that have already won over critics and wine fans in many countries worldwide. Three elaborations combine the value of a centuries-old tradition and knowledge with the most innovative viticultural techniques. As we said at the beginning, nothing ends with the harvest, but rather a new stage in a process that goes from the roots of our ancient vines to the glasses of thousands of wine lovers.

Above all, we hope that the 2023 vintage of Pazo Baión will make the people who taste our wines happy.