Falstaff Magazin International 00/2021

wine / RIBERA DEL DUERO

wine / RIBERA DEL DUERO The Picos de Urbion mountains in the sparsely populated retgion of Soria. Apparently, there are more deer in Soria than people, at least that is what the winemakers like to joke about. But like so many things said in jest, this contains some truth: Soria, along with Cuenca in Castillla-La Mancha and Teruel in Aragon, is one of the most thinly populated areas in all of Spain. Soria is located at the eastern end of the Ribera del Duero region, far away from wine hotspots like La Horra and Aranda de Duero in Burgos or Pesquera and Penafiel in Valladolid. Soria is the highest and coolest subzone of the D.O. Ribera del Duero, an appellation created in 1982. The Picos de Urbion mountain range, where the headwaters of the Duero River rise, is just 50km/30 miles away. Most of the vineyards here are at an altitude of about 900m/2,953ft above sea level – and altitude is key. The grapes ripening in these cooler temperatures differ significantly from those of other Ribera del Duero subregions. Tinto Fino, as Tempranillo is called in Ribera del Duero, needs these elevated, cool sites to retain sufficient acidity – without it the wines run the danger of disappearing into a rather uniform triviality of high alcohol and concentration. Soria thus offers a rather different kind of potential. THE GRAPES RIPENING IN THESE COOLER TEMPERATURES DIFFER SIGNIFICANTLY FROM THOSE OF OTHER RIBERA DEL DUERO SUBREGIONS. BENEFITTING FROM CLIMATE CHANGE The freshness that characterises the wines from Soria is not only down to altitude. It is also boosted by its location between two mountain ranges: Sistema Ibérico and Sistema Central. Growing conditions for vines here are more extreme than in Burgos where approximately 80% of Ribera del Duero vineyards are located. The danger of spring frosts is higher and the vegetation period is shorter – and in the cooler past this meant that grapes often struggled to ripen fully. They still do today in cooler years. For a long time, growing grapes in Photos: Shutterstock, @ 2020 Dewald Kirsten/Shutterstock. 42 falstaff summer 2021

Maturing wine being sampled from the barrel. Soria was considered a daring challenge. But climate change – ever more noticeable – also changed attitudes. Peter Sisseck, the region’s star winemaker of Dominio de Pingus fame, now buys about 20% of the grapes for his PSI wine in Soria. PSI is a wine this legendary Danish winemaker blends from the grapes of around 800 wine growers across all of Ribera del Duero. In Soria he finds the limestone soils which define the style of this wine – and more freshness than in other subregions. It was not Sisseck, however, who put the region on the map and revived it. That was down to a different visionary. In the late A DESERTED VALLEY, A SORT OF WILDER- NESS WITH COUNTLESS OVERGROWN VINE- YARDS. TIME SEEMED TO HAVE STOOD STILL IN VALE DE ATAUATA. 1990s, Miguel Sanchez, a wine merchant from Madrid, chanced upon a deserted valley, a sort of wilderness with countless overgrown vineyards. That was Soria. Time seemed to have stood still in Vale de Atauta: at the almost ludicrous altitude for viticulture of 1,000m/3,281ft, Sanchez found ancient vines that had been planted before the phylloxera crisis late in the 19th century. A true treasure that prompted Sanchez to start the Dominio de Atauta estate in 1999. Even his earliest vintages beguiled the critics and Dominio de Atauta became the new star of Ribera del Duero in record time. It was the star that < summer 2021 falstaff 43