Viña Clavidor

Bodegas Vidal Soblechero is based in the village of La Seca in the heart of DO Rueda. More than half of the estate is planted with the white Verdejo grape variety, but the family also farm some Tinta Fina (the local name for Tempranillo) and old Viura vines.

Brother and sister, Alicia and Vidal founded the small Vidal Soblechero winery in the 1990s. The vineyard is built on the legacy handed down by their father, Claudio, and by his parents before him, who for forty years tended the family’s 42 hectares of vineyard with the utmost care. Alicia and Vidal focus on quality over volume and are committed to a traditional and organic approach to their winemaking to ensure their wines fully express the terroir of this wonderful region.

Whether it’s avoiding pesticides or herbicide in the vineyard, using hawks to keep pests under control, or fermenting with natural yeasts, everything the family does is based on winemaking tradition, a natural approach and minimum intervention. All of which allows the terroir, the vines and the grapes to express themselves in their wonderful wines.

Viña Clavidor Cepas Viejas is a 50/50 blend of old Viura vines – an increasing rarity in Rueda – and Verdejo.

Verdejo is mainly grown in Castilla y León and especially in DO Rueda where it makes up nearly 90% of the harvest, so it really is the dominant grape variety in the region. You can expect a good wine made from Verdejo to be brimming with fruit flavours like apple, fresh lime and maybe even a touch of melon, coupled with aromas of fresh grass, pine and sometimes even a bit of fennel.

Viura (aka Macabeo in Catalunya) is Spain’s fifth-most widely planted grape. It's a productive variety and is fairly adaptable, so is often seen in blends. But you will also find single varietal wines made from this grape. Viura brings aromas of white fruit to this wine, coupled with floral and sometimes aniseed notes.

Rueda is an historic wine region with winemaking traditions that stretch back to the Middle Ages. It is famed for the Verdejo grape and its fresh, unoaked dry white wines which are very approachable and easy to drink.

Centred around the town of Rueda in Castilla y León, about 170km north-west of Madrid, Rueda spans the provinces of Valladolid, Segovia and Avila and sits in the depression formed by the Duero river valley in the middle of the Meseta Central (Spain’s central plain). With 20,000 hectares of vineyard, Rueda is one of Spain’s larger DOs and has around 75 registered wineries.

Far from the coast and at an altitude of 600-780 metres above sea level, Rueda’s winters are cold and long, late frosts are frequent, and summers are hot and dry. But the variation between day and night-time temperatures is a positive factor, as the heat helps the sugars develop in the grapes while cooler temperatures at night help to lock in acidity.

Following a manual harvest the grapes are taken to the winery in the village of La Seca and undergo a 10-hour cold maceration at 4ºC to help extract more fruit aromas from the grapes. This is followed by a light press and fermentation with native yeasts at 16ºC. The wine does not undergo malolactic fermentation (used sometimes with certain grape varieties to tone down acidity). The wine is aged in stainless steel tanks before bottling.