Discovering Utiel-Requena

This Spanish wine region benefits from unique growing conditions and is the heartland of native grape, Bobal, yet many drinkers have never tried its wines. Seek out a new side of Spain, and find wines to taste, with our Decanter guide

Wine lovers are always looking for two things: the little-known producer who’s about to step up into the big league, or the unknown country or region that can bring wow factor to a dinner party or tasting. Everyone likes to be surprised by something unexpected…

So step forward Utiel-Requena, a paradoxical region that’s a ‘new arrival’ despite having 2,700 years of winemaking history and has as its defining characteristic a grape variety that’s both widely planted and barely known. We’ll come back to Bobal in a minute.

First, let’s pinpoint the region on a map. If you were driving south down Spain’s east coast from Barcelona (a long drive, admittedly) when you’re about halfway down you hit the city of

Valencia. It’s the home of paella, so worth stopping for a meal if you can.

Here you need to turn your back on the Mediterranean and head due west, inland towards the high dry lands of the Spanish interior. Some 80km later, you will be in Utiel-Requena.

The DO (Denominación de Origen) is on a high plateau, and its vines are planted, broadly speaking, 600-900m above sea level.

Unique climate

All of this makes for a continental climate with Mediterranean influences, which basically means hot and dry with some mitigating effects from the sea – at least for the easternmost wineries.

Essentially, though, grape-growing in this region is about heat, dryness and altitude. The region’s terracotta soils (alluvial and clay with limestone deposits) only get 450mm of rain a year, and that falls in the winter months, while the sunshine is more or less unchecked for six months a year. To put it in context, Utiel-Requena’s 2,800 hours of sun a year is 30% more than that enjoyed by the vignerons of Bordeaux.

It’s not a place for the faint-hearted, though. This is a tough climate in many respects: sub-zero in winter and baking in the heat of a summer’s afternoon. But that altitude makes a huge difference. While the mercury can hit 37°C on an August afternoon, it often drops to 15°C at night. This enormous diurnal shift means vines can recover from the heat and grapes can hang onto some of their precious acidity.

Long history

Perhaps the regularity of sunshine, the paucity of summer rainfall and the mitigating cool nights is what attracted some of the continent’s earliest winemaking civilisations.

Utiel-Requena is home to the oldest commercial winery in the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. The site at Las Pilillas produced large amounts of wine for trade from the 6th century BCE. Its old stone troughs and channels will

‘Astonishingly, half of the DO’s Bobal vines are over 40 years old’

reduce every wine-loving visitor to reverential silence. Connecting back through the millennia, they are a reminder of just how long and proud the history of grape-growing and winemaking in this area actually is – established and organised six centuries before the first Roman legions marched in.

Archaeologists in the region have also discovered the remains of amphoras from the 7th century BCE, belonging to the Phoenicians. In a lovely illustration of the timelessness of winemaking, some of the region’s wineries are today using clay vessels once again for ageing and fermentation. The grapes There have, of course, been changes down the centuries. International grape varieties, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah have been planted and are used for single varietal wines and in blends. In whites, alongside Spanish stalwart Macabeo, there are zesty Sauvignon Blancs and (often barrel-aged) Chardonnays.

Yet one of the beauties of Utiel-Requena is that this is a wine region that still very much has a unique focus. And that focus is the Bobal grape variety.

Pronounced ‘Bow-bal’ (with a hard ‘a’) the grape is widely planted across

Spain – particularly in the east. But in Utiel-Requena it’s very much the star of the show, making up over 70% of the DO’s plantings. All of the wineries that bottle their own wine do at least one single-varietal Bobal.

Its name comes from the Latin ‘bovale’, meaning ‘bull’s head’. It’s supposedly a reference to the shape of the grape bunches, and while you might need to squint to make that work, what’s undeniably clear is that the grape is as brilliantly suited to its environment as any proud Spanish toro. Bobal benefits For starters, it’s a sturdy and tough variety: highly disease-resistant but also brilliant at absorbing water, which is important in such a dry region. Add these two elements together and you have a grape that requires very little input from the grower. That’s great news for the increasing number of farmers who are now shifting to minimum intervention or organic viticulture.

Stylistically, Bobal can provide approachable red-fruited young wines – think raspberry, cherry and floral top-notes – through to darker, more intense blackberry, chocolate and wild herb offerings. The latter often come from the top vineyards and older vines, of which there are many. Astonishingly, half of the DO’s Bobal vines are over 40 years old, and with their lower yields these old vines provide the ultimate expression of the variety, with real depth and complexity.

The key to understanding Bobal, however, is, perhaps, not just its flavours but its structure. Its thick skins give it a natural vibrancy of colour, and silky, savoury tannins. Scientific studies have proved that those skins also make Bobal high in the antioxidant resveratrol which makes them good for the heart.

But – crucially – as well as tannin, the whole wine is underpinned by a naturally crisp acidity. It’s not something you’d expect from such a hot climate and it’s one of the reasons why the grape has always been popular for making rosé.

In the hands of a skilled and ambitious winemaker – of which there are many among the 5,000-plus families working in vineyards and wineries across the DO – Bobal can make red wines that are both accessible and refreshing when young, but also have the structure to age.

Bobal can be bright and fresh as the Mediterranean breeze or poetic and brooding like the high lands of the

sierras. It can, in other words, capture the soul of a very special region.