The Grape From Manchuela

CASAS-IBÁÑEZ, Spain — For as long as history has paid attention to matters of wine, three red grapes have dominated production in southeastern Spain: garnacha, monastrell and bobal.

Garnacha and monastrell are renowned around the world, though they are far better known under their French names, grenache and mourvèdre. Bobal, however, has languished in its home territory. For decades bobal served primarily as the raw material for bulk wines produced by cooperatives, either for local consumption or export, where it was used to beef up wan reds.

Outside this small city and throughout the region of Manchuela, old vineyards of bobal (pronounced boh-BAHL) grow resolutely in sandy limestone soils, recognizable by their thick gnarled vines, trained for decades into free-standing goblet shapes. They stand in sharp contrast to neat rows of vines on wire trellises, evidence of efforts to modernize the region with international grapes like merlot, tempranillo or cabernet sauvignon.

For the last decade or so, a handful of producers has striven to demonstrate the pleasures of bobal. They believe that Manchuela, written off for so long, has the capacity to make wines as fine as anywhere else.

Working primarily in Manchuela, southeast of Madrid and inland from the coastal city of Valencia, and spilling over into the region of Utiel-Requena just to the east, these small producers, with little guidance from tradition or inspiration from great bobal wines elsewhere in the world, have resurrected old bobal vineyards and made wines that are both distinctive and delicious.

Primary among them are Juan Antonio Ponce of Bodegas Ponce, whose wines are a thrilling combination of elegance, finesse and mineral intensity; Rosalía Molina and Manolo Garrote of Altolandon in the northern part of the region, whose dedication to their muse has resulted in both excellent bobals and other wines, like a lip-smacking, energetic muscat blanc à petits grains; and Toni Sarrión of Bodega Mustiguillo just over the appellation border in Utiel-Requena, who is focusing on old bobal as well as merseguera, an obscure local white, which in his hands has made wines of depth, complexity and texture. It would be wrong to call Manchuela Godforsaken, but it seems to have been forsaken by most everybody else. Once the region was known for its saffron production. But, as with much of rural Europe, many residents in the mid-20th century fled agricultural work for the cities, leaving many small towns barren.

In the dusty vineyards, stout evergreen oaks stand forlornly, offering a moment of shade to sweating vineyard workers. Outside sleepy towns, the giant silver tanks of the cooperatives loom, the destiny for most of the grapes.

The busy exceptions are a network of medieval towns crowned by 12th-century Moorish castles, set on the banks of the Júcar River, which carved wondrous canyons through limestone hills. In tourist centers like Alcalá del Júcar, visitors flock to see medieval troglodyte caves, some of which have now been turned into bars and restaurants.

Some hope that the new focus on producing distinctive wines will rejuvenate Manchuela. The area has no more passionate an advocate than Victor de la Serna, a journalist who became one of Spain’s leading wine writers at El Mundo, a Madrid daily. He is also the founder and owner of Finca Sandoval in Manchuela. While de la Serna cherishes bobal, his philosophy is to make wines from a blend of grapes, which he believes is the tradition of Mediterranean southern Europe.

De la Serna is from Madrid, but his wife’s family is from Manchuela, which drew him to the area. In 1998, he bought land in Manchuela and started Finca Sandoval.

He rented old vineyards of bobal, but on his own land he planted syrah and touriga nacional, a leading port grape. His 2016 Cuvée TNS, a blend of touriga nacional with syrah, is deep and dark, fresh and complex. The flagship wine, Finca Sandoval, made of 70 percent syrah and the rest monastrell and bobal, smells like syrah but has an unusual flavor of exotic fruits and flowers.

“Manchuela is like most southern European regions,” he told me as we walked through a bobal vineyard planted in 1939 by the grandfather of his winemaker, Rafael Orozco. “Let’s not depend on a single variety, it’s a trap.” De la Serna reasoned that bobal was rustic, exceedingly tannic when young. Grapes like syrah and touriga nacional, which he loved, might help to smooth it out.

“I think I was more right in introducing syrah than people who introduced cabernet sauvignon,” he said. “My biggest responsibility is not to bobal, it’s to Manchuela.”

Still, bobal is the most distinctive variety the region has to offer, and in the right hands, as at Bodegas Ponce, the wines can be fascinating. The tannins are firm, yes, but the grape also has great acidity and freshness and can transmit the nuances of terroir.

“Serious bobal has been made only over the last 20 years,” de la Serna said. “Does it age? It’s not yet clear.”

If anybody can make the case for bobal, it would be Ponce (pronounced PAHN-thay), whose wines are the most nuanced and energetic of the Manchuela producers I have tasted. Ponce, whose family is from the nearby town of Iniesta, worked with Telmo Rodríguez, a leading producer who makes wines all over Spain, before returning to Manchuela to concentrate on his own wines. In 2017, he moved into his own new winery.

Ponce manages a network of old vineyards, which he farms biodynamically, each of which shows a different perspective on bobal. La Casilla, from limestone, is supremely mineral yet light and elegant. La Estrecha, which comes from granite soils, is more savory and powerful, while Pino, named for a lone pine tree in the middle of a limestone vineyard about 2,500 feet in elevation, is the most complex.

Perhaps his favorite vineyard is the 90-year-old P.F., for pie franco, meaning that the vines are ungrafted, a rarity in most of the fine-wine world. Since the 19th century, when a plague of phylloxera ravaged most of Europe’s grapevines, the solution was to graft the European vines onto American roots, which are immune to the aphid. This vineyard, though, is on sandy soils, in which phylloxera cannot survive. The wine is stony, floral, herbal and fine.

“This vineyard is the museum of the region,” he said as we walked through it. “It is my identity: P.F., Pie Franco, Ponce Family.” He loves bobal, which he calls “unique and mystical,” yet as with de la Serna, the grape is not the crucial element.

“For me, what’s important is the vineyard, not the particular grapes,” Ponce said, pointing at the old goblet-trained vines. “This is the typical Manchuela. Now, they pay for color and alcohol,” he said, referring to consumers and restaurants responding to critic’s wine scores.

Ponce also makes Las Cañadas, an exceptional rosé of bobal; Reto, a lively, citrus-tinged white from the albillo de Albacete grape; and Depaula, a structured, deep red from monastrell grown south of Manchuela.

“The challenge is to make wine interesting to me,” he said.

In the hillier north of Manchuela, at an elevation of almost 3,500 feet, bobal is just one of many grapes grown by Rosalía Molina and Manolo Garrote at Altolandon. The husband-and-wife team work in the town of Landete near where three provinces, Cuenca, Teruel and Valencia meet. The wind blows constantly, hence the big wind turbines on a ridgeline nearby, and it is easy to be organic as the wind keeps things dry and fresh. Garrote manages the vineyards, and Molina makes the wines.

They include the excellent white Doña Leo, made of muscat, and another white, a spicy and unusual blend of chardonnay and petit manseng. Rayuelo is her bobal, citrus-edged and smelling like violets, with exotic fruit flavors and fine tannins. She also makes a savory cabernet franc and dense, floral garnacha, fermented and aged partly in amphora.

Molina said she tries to make the wines as naturally as possible, without filtering and with a bare minimum of sulfur dioxide as a stabilizer. They are not typical in the region, which she said was a problem.

“Do we make everything good or do we make wines that will be commercial?” she said. “We keep making the wines we want to make and try to explain why our wines are different, but it’s difficult to explain our wines in Spain.” Perhaps as a result, 90 percent of their wines are exported. They will soon be sold in New York through Skurnik Wines.

For American consumers, the challenge is to find the wines. The Ponce wines are available in the United States and are great values, ranging from under $20 for the rosé and white and up to $30 or $40 for the bobals. Bodegas Mustiguillo is in the United States as well. But Finca Sandoval is currently between importers, and other young, ambitious producers, like Cien y Pico and Bodegas Gratias are virtually impossible to find in the United States despite their very good wines.

If bobal’s charms are not immediately obvious to everybody, they make themselves felt over time. When Toni Sarrión first started making wines at Mustiguillo in Utiel in 1999, he was experimenting with tempranillo, cabernet sauvignon and merlot as well. But for his reds, he has settled on bobal, with a little garnacha and syrah, all grown organically in stony limestone vineyards.

His first bobals were dense, tannic and oaky, but he learned over time that finesse brought out the best in bobal.

“Now I prefer elegance over power,” he said. “Bobal keeps that edge of freshness, an advantage that neither garnacha nor monastrell have.”

His best reds, largely bobal with perhaps some garnacha and syrah as well, are labeled either Finca Terrerazo or Quincha Corral, depending on the vineyard. They are bright and lively, though still tannic. His most unusual wine, however, is the Finca Calvestra white, made of the obscure merseguera grape and aged in acacia barrels. It tastes of apples, flowers and herbs.

Bobal and merseguera. It may not have the ring of pinot noir and chardonnay, but nobody else has it except this part of Spain.