Bodegas Castaño

Yecla, a small tranquil town and at the same time the home of Bodegas Castaño is located in the middle of the Spanish Nirvana.

Bodegas Castaño - In the middle of the winery El Dorado

It's a hundred kilometers to the coast, and to Madrid you drive through a seemingly endless, dusty landscape. To the left and right, rugged cliffs and mountainsides vie for attention, but otherwise, like the two highways to the capital, you tend to give the place a wide berth. 

Bodegas Castaño - Quality instead of Sangria

For wine lovers, however, Yecla is something like a small Eldorado. Just 4,500 hectares are under vines, which is just 3% of the area under Bordeaux, but they have a lot to offer. For a long time, Yecla did not have the financial means for more effective and modern vines or irrigation systems and all the accessories from the industrialization of wine in the eighties, so many of the old vines were simply left standing. Now that the focus is more on quality rather than sangria wine, these are pure gold and the capital stock for the Castaño family's great wines.

Bodegas Castaño is known for blending classic regional grape varieties, especially the expressive red Monastrell, with French grapes. Traditional vinification methods are still used here today, but at the same time they also rely on the most modern pressing technology. Ramón Castaño was the first winemaker in Yecla to vinify his wines in barricas. 

Dedication that you can taste at Castaño

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

The Castaños are convinced that wine-growing areas should take care of their well-tuned grape varieties and the typicality of their wines. With this attitude, they have reinvented Yecla wines. Spicy, untamed peasant wines have become elegant, complex reds that do not, however, hide their origins.

These are the grape varieties of the Bodegas Castaño winery:

• Monastrell
• Syrah
• Viura