The Río Duero runs across the northern part of the meseta (plateau). Although it is the third largest river in the peninsula, it does little to temper the austere, arid landscape that is best suited for flocks of grazing sheep.
But along the way to Portugal (where it changes its name to Douro, eventually entering the Atlantic at Oporto), the Duero waters hundreds of bodegas that produce some of the most spectacular and sought-after wines in Spain. The stellar roster of vineyards includes such well-known names as Vega Sicilia, Pingus, Pesquera, Protos, and Viña Pedrosa. These are powerful, elegant wines, plummy and full of berries and leathers, clay and spice, and hints of oaks for structure. Along with La Rioja and Priorat, the Ribera del Duero has been awarded the top-level Denominación de Origen Calificada (Qualified Denomination of Origin or D.O.C.) status. There are also three other wine areas along the river that have Denominación de Origen (Denomination of Origin or D.O.) status: Toro, Rueda, and Arribes del Duero.
Although recently uncovered Roman mosaics—including a particularly large (710 square feet/66 square metres) and well-preserved one of Bacchus, the god of wine, discovered in the village of Baños de Valdearados—show that wine was being produced in the Ribera del Duero some 2,000 years ago, it was Middle Age plantings by Cistercian and Benedictine monks that formed the origins of the modern tradition. By the thirteenth century, the monks were using underground cellars to protect their wines from the region’s rather extreme climate.
On the northern end of the D.O.C. Ribera del Duero area, where vineyards give way to cereals, sits the tiny village of Pedrosa. “We don’t have a bakery, but we have a number of world-class wineries,” Manuel “Manolo” Pérez Pascuas told me. He is one of the three Pérez Pascuas brothers behind the legendary Viña Pedrosa wines. The vineyards had been their father’s, and in the early 1980s the trio decided that the quality of the grapes was sufficient to produce better, and better-aging, wines. They were right. Their crianzas (aged for two years), reservas (aged for at least three years), and, in exceptional years, gran reservas (aged at least five years) all stand out.
Sitting in the shade behind the winery having a late breakfast, something of a tradition with the family—a plate of jamón ibérico and chorizo, wedges of aged, almost crystallized Manchego cheese, and bread from the truck that passed through town in the morning, with, of course, a bottle of Viña Pedrosa—certain descriptions kept coming up in reference to their wines: personalidad, elegancia, mucho carácter, and that it keeps and ages well.
Why was this? I asked. What gave them such a distinct character? “Quality begins in the vineyard,” Manolo said. That means many things, but he honed in on two. The first was the rather extreme and dry climate. Ribera del Duero has some of the highest vineyards in the world (and the last to be harvested in Spain). Viña Pedrosa’s land is at around 2,700 feet/850 metres above sea level. The sharp difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures helps the growth of the grapes during the day, but allows them, at night, to balance acidity and aromas. Or, as Manolo put it, “The grapes have time to recuperate from the heat.” (I laughed when he likened it to “having a cold beer after a hot day.”)
The second reason he named was the grapes themselves. The main varietal is called Tinto Fino or Tinto del País, the local name for Tempranillo, which is well adapted for the conditions. Later, as we strolled the fields together, Manolo showed me clusters of these with paternal tenderness. He kept picking and popping grapes into his mouth. “Taste one!” he said a dozen times. The grapes were ripe and plump. The harvest was just days from beginning.
I had been hearing excellent predictions for the year. Manolo was more prosaic when I asked him about this. “My father always said, ‘Until the last day of the harvest, when you shut the bodega door, you don’t know if you’ve got a good wine.’ ”
It reminded me of a Catalan expression that my wife likes to say: “No diguis blat fins que sigui al sac i ben lligat.” That translates to something like, “Don’t say you have wheat until you have it in the sack and tightly knotted,” the equivalent of “Don’t count your chickens until they hatch.”
But Manolo was not offering me country wisdom. He meant it literally. Anything could happen between now and the end of the harvest. Having spent his life among these fields, he had seen it all.
