Bodegas Castaño

Yecla, a small tranquil place and at the same time home to Bodegas Castaño, is located in the middle of the Spanish nowhere.

Bodegas Castaño - In the middle of a winery Eldorado

It is a hundred kilometers to the coast and to get to Madrid you travel through an almost endless, dusty landscape. To the left and right, rugged rock formations and hillsides vie for attention, but otherwise, like the two highways to the capital, you tend to give the place a wide berth. 

Bodegas Castaño - Quality instead of sangria

For wine lovers, however, Yecla is something like a small Eldorado. Just 4,500 hectares are under vine, which is only 3% of the vineyard area of Bordeaux, but they are quite something. Since Yecla long lacked the financial means for more efficient and modern vines or irrigation systems and all the paraphernalia from the industrialization era of wine in the eighties, many of the old vines simply remained. Now that the focus is more on quality instead of sangria wine, these are worth pure gold and the basic capital for the great wines of the Castaño family.

Bodegas Castaño is known for combining classic regional grape varieties, especially the expressive red Monastrell, with French grapes. Traditional vinification methods are still used here to this day and at the same time the winery relies on the most modern pressing technology. Ramón Castaño was the first winemaker in Yecla to age his wines in barricas. 

Dedication you can taste at Castaño

The great art of Bodegas Castaño is to offer excellent wines at very fair prices. The flat, expansive Espinal vineyards southwest of Yecla actually make the work quite easy and since land here is still quite affordable, they can cope with lower yields. The light clay soil interspersed with limestone ensures that the wines do not become too heavy even in great heat, and the great dedication that the Castaños show even for these inexpensive wines can be tasted directly in the glass. 

The Castaños are convinced that wine-growing regions should preserve their established grape varieties and the typicity of their wines. With this attitude they have reinvented Yecla wines. Spicy, untamed peasant wines have become elegant, multi-layered reds that, however, do not hide their origins.

These are the grape varieties of the Bodegas Castaño estate:

• Monastrell
• Syrah
• Viura