Bodegas Fontana

Bodegas Fontana farm at Ucles, a small appellation in Castilla-La Mancha south-east of Madrid, created only in 2006 and covering the high country around the town of the same name.

Castilla-La Mancha is the largest continuous vineyard area on earth, and most of it produces wine in enormous volume from the flat, hot plain. Ucles is the exception: the vineyards climb the slopes of the Altomira range at 700 to 900 metres, where nights are genuinely cold and the growing season is long. The town is dominated by a monastery-fortress that was the headquarters of the Order of Santiago, one of the great military orders of the reconquest.

The estate works Tempranillo and Garnacha alongside Syrah, Verdejo and Sauvignon Blanc, and the Cuvee wines are named after pigments: Celadon, Cobalto, Alizarina. Altitude is what makes them possible, and Ucles remains far less known than it deserves.