Soto Manrique

Soto Manrique is a small estate at Cebreros, in the province of Ávila, on the northern flank of the Sierra de Gredos about ninety minutes west of Madrid. The name is Chuchi Soto's two family surnames. He set the project up in 2012, after twenty-five years working on other people's wines in Spain and abroad, and moved the winery into Cebreros in 2016, which is when he started buying vineyards of his own.

There are roughly twenty hectares now, in small scattered parcels between 700 and 1,100 metres, planted with old Garnacha and Albillo Real. Those are the two grapes of the DOP Cebreros, and these are the vineyards that used to be picked for bulk wine and were quietly being abandoned; Soto's stated purpose is to recover the ones that have survived. The soils are granite and slate, poor and free-draining, and altitude is what makes the difference. Garnacha at 900 metres in the mountains ripens slowly and holds its acidity, which is something it cannot do on the flat, hot sites further south where most Spanish Garnacha is grown. That, rather than anything done in the cellar, is why this corner of Spain has become interesting.

The farming is organic and the estate describes its methods as chosen to protect the biodiversity of the sites. In the cellar the work is deliberately plain: spontaneous fermentation on native yeasts in concrete tanks, a proportion of whole bunches in the single-site wines, and ageing in large wooden vats of 100 to 150 hectolitres rather than small new barrels. None of that is there to add flavour, which is the point of it.

Gredos has been the region to watch in Spain for fifteen years or so. It sits where Ávila, Madrid and Toledo meet, and what has come out of it has changed the argument about what Garnacha is for. Soto Manrique is not the loudest name in those mountains, but it is a serious one, and the prices are still fair for what is in the bottle.

The reds are all Garnacha. La Transición is the introduction. La Viña de Ayer is the village wine, from parcels between 750 and 1,060 metres on granite and slate, aged a year in 150-hectolitre French oak vats. Above those sit the single-site wines: La Cruz Verde, from the Paraje de Villalba at 850 metres on silty granite, and Las Violetas, from very poor sandy granite at 950 metres. Both spend fourteen months in a large wooden vat and are made the same way, so read them side by side and you can taste what a hundred metres and a change of soil actually does. That is the best argument for this part of Spain anyone can make in two bottles.

There are whites too, and several of them: two Albillo Real wines, one of them barrel-aged, plus a pét-nat, a blanc de noirs and a straw-dried sweet wine. Above the single-site reds sit two more again, Alto de la Estrella and Las Loberas.