Bodegas Castaño

Yecla, a small, tranquil place and also the home of Bodegas Castaño, lies in the middle of Spanish Nirvana.

Bodegas Castaño - based in an Eldorado of wineries

It is a hundred kilometres to the coast and an almost endless, dusty landscape to Madrid. To the left and right, rugged cliffs and mountainsides vie for attention, but otherwise, like the two motorways to the capital, you tend to steer clear of the town. 

Bodegas Castaño - Quality instead of Sangria

But for wine lovers, Yecla is something of an El Dorado. Only 4,500 hectares are under vines, which is just 3% of the area under Bordeaux, but they are something special. As Yecla has long lacked the financial means for more effective and modern vines or irrigation systems and all the accessories from the industrialisation of wine in the eighties, many of the old vines simply stopped. Now that the focus is more on quality rather than sangria wine, they are pure gold and the capital stock 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 today, while at the same time the most modern wine press technology is used. Ramón Castaño was the first winemaker in Yecla to produce his wines in barricas. 

Devotion that you can taste at Castaño

The great art of Bodegas Castaño is to offer excellent wines at very fair prices. The flat, extensive Espinal vineyards southwest of Yecla make the work actually quite easy and since the land is quite affordable here, one can also manage with lower yields. The light-coloured clay soil interspersed with limestone ensures that the wines do not become too heavy, even in very hot weather, and you can taste the great devotion that the Castaños also show for these inexpensive wines directly in the glass. 

The Castaños are convinced that wine-growing regions should cultivate their adapted grape varieties and the typicality of their wines. With this attitude they have reinvented the Yecla wines. Spicy, untamed farm wines have become elegant, multi-layered reds that do not hide their origin.

These are the grape varities of Bodegas Castaño:

• Monastrell
• Syrah
• Viura