Celler del Roure
Pablo Calatayud, close to a hundred buried seventeenth-century clay jars and the Valencian grapes nobody wanted.
Celler del Roure started up in the late nineties in Moixent, in the Terres dels Alforins, set up by Pablo Calatayud and his father once Pablo finished his agronomy degree. The family didn’t come from wine: they came from furniture. They began the way everyone began back then, with international varieties and new oak, until Calatayud concluded that none of it was really his, or really from here.
The turn came on two fronts at once. First the grapes: he set about rescuing Mandó, Arcos, Forcallà and Verdil, local varieties the twentieth century had grubbed up for giving too little colour and too little alcohol. Then the vessel. In 2006 the family bought a neighbouring estate that turned out to be hiding a celler soterrani, three underground galleries holding some ninety-six buried clay tinajas, built between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than turn it into a museum, they put it back to work.
Since then much of the range ferments and ages in clay, with no new wood anywhere near it, off organically farmed vineyards on chalky soils at 600 metres. The result is a set of pale, fresh, thoroughly drinkable wines (Vermell, Safrà, Parotet, the white Cullerot) that dragged Valencia out of the bulk-wine drawer, plus a top range, Ferrero i Senís, where the bar goes higher still.