Winemakers in Ribera del Duero are determined to showcase the area’s potential to craft a range of increasingly elegant wines. Richard Woodard reports. A glance at the facts underpinning the Ribera del Duero DO might encourage thoughts of uniformity or homogeneity. Of its 27,000 hectares of vines, an overwhelming majority (26,000ha) are Tempranillo (aka Tinto Fino or Tinta del País). There may be smatterings of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec and Garnacha – and don’t forget white variety Albillo Mayor – but Ribera del Duero is emphatically all about red wine, and red wine made from Tempranillo. Talk to Pablo Baquera, marketing director of the Consejo Regulador de la DO Ribera del Duero, however, and he’ll tell you that vines are just one of the four pillars that mark out the area’s wines as exceptional. For a start, there’s the climate: famously hot, dry summers and long, harsh winters, little rainfall and an eyewatering temperature range from 40o C in summer to -20o C in winter. Then there is the local geology: with vines planted at various altitudes from 720m above sea level to more than 1,000m, more than 30 different soil types have been identified, of which the most common are clay, limestone and stony. “In Ribera del Duero, due to different soils, plot orientations, age of the vineyards, altitude, use of different varieties, although we have a ‘king’ variety in Tempranillo, different winemaking processes, different ageing … we can offer to trade and consumers great-quality wines, together with
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Fine Wine
