Castilla-La Mancha

Castilla-La Mancha

The parched plain where Don Quixote tilted at windmills — La Mancha, the largest wine region on earth, has long been spoken of as a place of quantity rather than quality.

The reality is a treasury of old vines lying on a plateau 600 to 800 metres above the sea. With 3,000 hours of sunshine a year and a punishing dryness, these bush-trained veterans have survived without irrigation by driving their roots deep, and they yield very little fruit — but fruit of astonishing concentration.

Growers who believe in what this land can do are breathing new life into the indigenous Airen and Cencibel (Tempranillo), and from what was once dismissed as an ocean of cheap wine, bottles of real character and quality are now emerging one after another.

Manchego cheese, pisto, slow-cooked lamb — taste the deep-rooted strength of this dry country, honed alongside the honest cooking of La Mancha itself.