Arcos

Arcos is a native red from the Terres dels Alforins, inland Valencia, and one of those grapes that came within a whisker of vanishing without anyone noticing. Its crime was twofold: it gives little colour and little alcohol, and on top of that it ripens late. In an era when the local wine went off in tankers and was paid for by strength and depth of colour, that was reason enough to pull it up and plant something else.

What was a flaw then is exactly what everyone’s after now. Arcos makes pale wines with clean red fruit, a liveliness and natural acidity that don’t come easily in a Mediterranean climate, and none of the alcoholic heft that flattens everything else. It usually has company (Forcallà or Mandó, its lifelong neighbours) and it takes beautifully to ageing in clay tinajas, which add nothing and let it speak. It survived on sandy, chalky plots because somebody never got round to grubbing it up. Lucky us.