Finca Torremilanos

The Free Bacchus Story

In April 1975 Pablo Peñalba signed for an estate outside Aranda de Duero that had grown vines since 1903, when Calixto Seijas Ruiz Zorrilla planted what had been sheep pasture. The family history calls Peñalba a man of tight means and enormous enterprise, one of the pioneers of the Ribera del Duero appellation. His wife, Pilar Pérez Albéniz, still runs Torremilanos, and in 2004 their son Ricardo began taking the herbicides and synthetic sprays out of its vineyards.

Ribera del Duero is high, bare Tempranillo country, where the grape goes by Tinto Fino. The vineyards sit around eight hundred metres up, where a summer day in the high thirties can fall to single figures overnight, and that swing is why the reds come out darker and more structured than Rioja’s. Ricardo says that in the 1970s, when his family helped build the modern Ribera, the wines that mattered here were still claretes: red and white grapes fermented together on their skins into a light, bright red. His Ojo Gallo brings the style back, with 40 per cent white grapes.

The estate farms 200 hectares at 800 to 900 metres on the south bank of the Duero, without irrigation, herbicides or insecticides. Most of the compost comes from sheep grazing the land along the river, and fungus is kept in check with infusions of chamomile, horsetail and nettle. Cyclo, the flagship red, comes from three of the oldest bush-vine plots, one planted more than 160 years ago at 1,010 metres, and no sulphur is added while it is made. The whole vintage fits in one 7,800-litre concrete vat.

The EU organic register lists the company, Bodegas Peñalba López, under CAECYL, the Castilla y León control body, for growing grapes and making wine. Demeter, the international biodynamic certifier, lists Finca Torremilanos on its own register as producer and processor. The grapes and the wine are certified organic and biodynamic.