What does La Mancha, the underrated wine region in Spain, have to offer?

As far as wine landscapes are concerned, the region of La Mancha is an oddball in the beauty stakes. The vineyards are bereft of the geographic features that usually accompany other wine regions: There are no verdant valleys to lend a bucolic vibe, no mountains to act as powerful guardians. The area, part of the wider Castilla-La Mancha region in landlocked central Spain, is a largely flat and dry plateau of vast plains.

Despite its flatness, La Mancha is actually a meseta, an elevated plateau with an average altitude of 700 metres above sea level. Driving on its dusty roads, the vastness of the landscape is deceptively downplayed by a running vignette of vineyards, farms and small towns scattered across your view.

But head up to one of the few hills in the village of Alcazar de San Juan, where defunct windmills still stand, and you get a true sense of the lay of the land. The plateau stretches as far as the eye can see, a scale worthy of a widescreen canvas of a David Lean epic. Here, sunsets are dreamy spectacles.

The sun is La Mancha’s best friend. The region enjoys over 3,000 hours of sunlight every year – a generous amount when compared with sunny Bordeaux’s 2,000 hours a year – allowing the vines to develop very ripe grapes and produce the bold, fruity wines the region is known for. To protect the grapes from being sunburned, most of the vines are trained low to the ground with a thick canopy of leaves, a style known as Goblet. La Mancha is also the largest wine-growing area in the world.

NOT JUST ABOUT BULK WINE

The Romans introduced viticulture to the region after their conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. But it wasn’t till the 14th century, during the tail end of the Reconquista (722 to 1492) – a protracted military campaign undertaken by Christians to reclaim territories taken by Muslim kingdoms – that wine development in La Mancha took shape. The Christian communities who settled down began planting vines, largely for sacramental wine.

In the 19th century, the wine industry flourished in Tomelloso, a town in the province of Ciudad Real, where many families dug underground caves beneath their homes to make and store wine. Today, there are more than 2,000 of these caves covering a distance of 40km beneath the streets of Tomelloso; the underground tunnels and their antique clay jars are not in use anymore, but many residents have kept these chambers as reminders of the town’s deep ties with wine.

“In Tomelloso, we say that we have wine instead of blood in our veins,” said Miguel Angel Valentin Lara, a third-generation winemaker of Bodegas Allozo Centro Espanolas in Tomelloso. “People live for agriculture here.”

Established in 1991, Bodegas Allozo Centro Espanolas owns 250 hectares of vineyards and makes around two million bottles a year, with a focus on Tempranillo (a red grape, also known locally as Cencibel, that is the most planted red variety in La Mancha at 30,000 hectares), Garnacha, and the white varieties Airen (the most planted grape in the region at 88,000 hectares) and Verdejo. The winery makes only DO (Denominacion de Origen) La Mancha wines.

DO La Mancha wines are made according to the strict quality standards of the region’s appellation rules. For example, grapes have to be grown within a demarcated DO La Mancha zone that overlaps the four surrounding provinces of Ciudad Real, Albacete, Cuenca, and Toledo; and yields from DO-certified vineyards with Goblet-trained vines should not exceed 10,000 kg per hectare.

A DO La Mancha wine’s label also has to state whether the wine is a Joven (young wine with little or no barrel-ageing and meant to be consumed within nine months), a Crianza (wine aged for two years, with at least one year in barrel and bottle), a Reserva (wine aged for at least 12 months in barrel and 24 months in the bottle), or a Gran Reserva (wine aged for at least 24 months in barrel and 36 months in the bottle).

Like many wineries in Tomelloso, Bodegas Allozo Centro Espanolas regards Tempranillo as the “number one Spanish grape”. “[In La Mancha], you get a good concentration of fruit with Tempranillo. That is perfect for making blends, young wines, and Reserva wines,” said Valentin Lara. The winery’s Allozo Tempranillo Gran Reserva 2016 is a standout, a robust Tempranillo with a good structure and hints of spice and vanilla.

Bodegas Allozo Centro Espanolas is one of the 238 wineries registered with DO La Mancha. The marketing folks at DO La Mancha are aware there is a misconception that all wines from La Mancha are of low quality, an idea stemming from the fact that Castilla-La Mancha, as a whole, is traditionally known as a source of bulk wine production (low quality wine produced in huge volume and then shipped in containers to other countries for bottling or blending), a business handled by big scale cooperatives.

It’s easy to see why the average consumer gets confused. In the DO La Mancha region, there are 270,000 hectares of vineyards, of which 150,000 hectares are DO-certified. Thus, not all producers inside the DO La Mancha region make DO-only wines; there are many cooperatives who straddle both bulk wine and DO winemaking duties. Two such cooperatives are Manjavacas in Cuenca, and Virgen de Las Vinas in Ciudad Real.

Manjavacas was founded in 1948 by a group of growers who wanted to help the struggling local economy after the Spanish Civil War. Partnering with 750 growers who work with 6,000 hectares of vineyards, the cooperative produces 50 million litres of wine a year. The company also makes other agricultural products like olive oil.

Bulk wine takes up 90 per cent of Manjavacas’ wine production – the remaining 10 per cent goes to bottled wine production, which includes IGP (Indicacion Geografica Protegida, a lower tier appellation) and DO La Mancha wines. Juan Fuente Rus, general manager of Manjavacas, said he expects the bottled wine production segment to grow. “You earn more selling bottled wines, and [its production] also gives more jobs to the villagers as you need to hire more workers to tend to the vineyards and bottling line,” he said.

Manjavacas makes a range of organic DO wines under the Sandogal brand, offering consumers a taste of what stalwart cooperatives like themselves can bring to quality winemaking. The Sandogal Seleccion Parcela 2020, made from Tempranillo sourced from a “parcel” of no more than seven hectares, is a beautiful wine with a lush mid-palate of dark fruit and touches of pepper, sandalwood and vanilla. The oak use is light-handed here, a style that is in line with modern Tempranillos and one that would appeal to those new to the grape variety.

Established in 1961, Virgen de Las Vinas is today the largest wine cooperative in Spain and Europe, working with more than 3,000 growers who get their fruit from 25,000 hectares of vineyards. It also makes a small selection of DO wines under its Tomillar brand. 

AN OVERLOOKED GRAPE GETS TO SHINE

The late Alejandro Fernandez is a name that needs no introduction among lovers of Spanish wine. The winemaker, who is credited for putting the region of Ribera del Duero on the map with his powerful Tempranillo wines, began his journey from humble roots.

As a young mechanic in the early 1970s, Fernandez wanted to make his own wines but lacked the capital to do so. After inventing a mechanical harvester for beetroot and potato cultivation, he used his earnings from the patent to buy vineyards and establish his winery, Pesquera. By the late 1980s, his rich, expressive Tempranillos were much sought after, prompting other winemakers to imitate his style.

Fernandez then set up Bodega Condado de Haza in Ribera del Duero’s Burgos province in 1995, followed by Bodega Dehesa La Granja in Castilla y Leon in 1998, and Bodega El Vinculo in La Mancha’s Ciudad Real in 1999. Today, the four wineries form the Familia Fernandez Rivera group. Fernandez passed away in 2021; the group is currently run by his granddaughters.

With El Vinculo, Fernandez left his imprint on La Mancha via Airen. When he set up El Vinculo, Airen was at the time mostly used by vintners for brandy production and in blends with Tempranillo as well as other white grapes. Put simply, no one took it seriously. But Fernandez discovered 100-year-old Airen vines, which encouraged him to make a varietal expression of the wine. In 2007, he made his first vintage of Airen and called it “Alejairen”, the moniker an amalgamation of his first name and the grape variety. It remains the only white wine produced by Fernandez and his company.

We tried the Alejairen 2011, which spent 24 months in American oak, a rare extended ageing for Airen. The ambrosia has aged beautifully: It bears a rust-orange hue and rich aromas of peach and apricot. The palate is soft and oily, with notes of vanilla, honey and cream. It brings to mind an aged German Riesling or something close to a Beerenauslese (late harvest German wine).

“It’s a real luxury to be able to enjoy an Airen [from La Mancha] that’s 12 years old and still so alive,” said Loly Perez, who oversees the day-to-day operations at El Vinculo. “The longer you keep this in the glass, the more it evolves; you’d start to taste some anise, too.”

Since its inception, El Vinculo has been practising organic viticulture but decided in 2018 to apply for organic certification to keep up with consumer demand for such official authentication. The path to certification is a four-year conversion process involving stringent checks – El Vinculo’s wines from the 2022 vintage onwards will carry the organic label.

Perez said her team at El Vinculo continues to follow the same winemaking practices set by Fernandez; no one is in a hurry to try new methods after the visionary’s passing. “We may be a big family of four wineries in different regions,” she said, “but we all share the same philosophy of respecting the land and the winemaking ways of our ancestors.”