Bodegas la Purísima Campules La Rubia Macabeo Yecla
£8.45
The wine
Bright and aromatic notes of juicy stone fruit and a touch of refreshing citrus lead to a light and vibrant palate full of fruit, with a crisp, mouthwatering finish. Easy, honest Yecla white.
Campules is the cooperative's contemporary range, and La Rubia means the blonde. Macabeo is the same grape as Viura in Rioja, and in the heat of Yecla it is picked early to keep the acidity. Vineyards here sit at 600 to 800 metres, which is the only reason a white wine from this latitude works at all.
The producer
Bodegas la Purísima
View all Bodegas la Purísima winesBodegas la Purisima is a growers' cooperative at Yecla in Murcia, founded in 1946 and now drawing on around a thousand members farming some 2,000 hectares.
Yecla is Monastrell country. The grape is known as Mourvedre in France and Mataro in Australia, and it needs more heat than almost any other variety to ripen properly, which is why it thrives in this arid corner of south-eastern Spain and struggles almost everywhere else. Vineyards sit at 600 to 800 metres on poor limestone soils, with barely 300 millimetres of rain a year and old bush vines that are dry-farmed by necessity.
Those conditions produce concentrated fruit at very low yields, which is why wines from Yecla and its neighbours Jumilla and Almansa offer some of the best value in Europe. Monastrell gives deep colour, firm tannin and a savoury, faintly gamey character that sets it apart from the softer Spanish reds further north.
