Region & History

Beneath the foundations of Pintia, a Vaccaean settlement near Padilla de Duero, archaeologists found wine residues dated to two and a half thousand years ago. People were drinking along the Duero long before the Romans arrived. The Romans came anyway, with force, and their traces still lie in the soil today. During the 1972 grape harvest, a plow in Baños de Valdearados uncovered a Roman mosaic, sixty-six square meters in size, with Bacchus and his drunken entourage at its center—one of the largest Bacchus mosaics on the entire Iberian Peninsula.

What lies beneath Aranda de Duero is more impressive than what stands above it. Between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, the inhabitants dug more than seven kilometers of passages beneath the old town. A hundred and thirty-five cellars survive to this day, fitted with round stone vaults and narrow entrances. Fresh air entered through the zarceras, slender shafts running from the street down to the cellar ceiling, which still rise from the pavement today like little chimneys. Without them, working underground would have been life-threatening: the fermentation fumes, known as tufo, displaced oxygen faster than a person could notice. Down there, the temperature holds steady at eleven to thirteen degrees Celsius, all year round. Constant as a refrigerator.

The next leap came from Bordeaux, though it landed in Valbuena del Duero. Eloy Lecanda had learned winemaking there and, in 1864, brought French vines to his new home: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec. They were originally meant for brandy. But in the end, it wasn't any of the imported varieties that won out—it was the native Tinto Fino. It held its own among the foreign vines and produced the best wine in the cellar. By his death in 1894, Lecanda had planted five hundred thousand vines. With them, he laid the foundation for Vega Sicilia, the estate that still leads the entire region today.

Nearly a hundred years later, a farm-equipment dealer from Pesquera de Duero bought a sixteenth-century stone press and began making wine on the side. In 1975, Alejandro Fernández bottled his first vintage under the name Tinto Pesquera, named after his hometown. Seven years later, on July 21, 1982, the region officially received Denominación de Origen status, with just twelve founding wineries at the start. Fernández was among them.

In 1985, the American critic Robert Parker compared the 1982 vintage of Tinto Pesquera to the great Bordeaux châteaux, awarding it ninety-eight out of a hundred points. Overnight, half the wine world knew a place they'd never heard of before. Today the Denominación counts over three hundred wineries, yet its governing council still doesn't sit in the region's largest city. It sits in Roa, one of the smaller towns along this river.