Cámbrico is a small Castilian-Leonese winery located in the heart of the Sierra de Francia, in Villanueva del Conde, south of the province of Salamanca. It is a project of just over 13 hectares whose central axis revolves around the recovery and development of wines from local varieties, and all of this is the work of a local, Fernando Maillo, a native of the Sierra de Francia.
To understand the strength of this initiative we must go back in time. This project was born in 1999 and the first thing Fernando did was to contact the universities to understand the grapes of his environment, as he wanted to work with local grapes even though he did not know them in depth.
He began to study the red rufete, the central axis of his project at the beginning, and to find certain similarities with pinot noir, with which it shares a fairly fine skin, medium-low tannicity, fairly high acidity and a very similar aromatic profile. As Fernando tells us "the Sierra was populated in the 11th century by Burgundians and Gascons, and most probably these people travelled with their seedlings and their own animals".
Rufete was once, together with calabrés (local clone of Garnacha), and aragonés (local clone of tempranillo), the most widely planted red grapes in the area. White rufete was the most widely planted white grape until phylloxera, when they began to abandon it due to its low production.
All this interest in their own grape led to the development of a study on the rufete coordinated by Jesús Yuste of the ITACyL, which allowed them to officially identify this grape and also to make a selection of the best plants studied in order to reproduce and plant them in Cámbrico. All this work to identify the red rufete led Cámbrico to fix its gaze on the white rufete, a variety that was known in the area as verdejo and which had nothing to do with the famous and widespread Castilian grape, so before confirming its name as white rufete it was decided to call it verdejo serrano, a way of differentiating it from the traditional verdejo, which according to Fernando Maillo still generated a great deal of confusion.
As history always repeats itself, they returned to carry out a study of this white grape, discovering that it was not a simple mutation of the red grape, despite its great similarities with it, a work of identification that took them, together with the D.O. Sierra de Salamanca, more than seven years.
The most striking feature of this variety is its thick skin and its good acidity. The first time the winery produced the white rufete was in 2009, a mere 100 litres as it was frankly difficult to find grapes of this almost extinct variety, with only a few single vines in every old vineyard. The house has planted and owns just over half a hectare of white rufete on granite and a colleague of the winery also owns a vineyard of this grape on slate soils, so they can make the white rufete on two different soils. Our nominee today, first in a list of very interesting projects, is the one coming from granite soils.
Viñas del Cámbrico Rufete Blanca 2019 is a wine fermented in fourth-use barrels, a relatively neutral wood that has allowed the grapes to ferment smoothly and contribute to the wine without overpowering the wine as a whole. The grape skins are so thick that the resulting wine has an unusual tannicity, making it a white wine capable of withstanding more intense gastronomy. Asking its creator about the ageing capacity of this wine, he states with confidence that it has a long way to go, "it is a wine that improves with the bottle, as it softens all its character". "We have also seen how our first tests with this grape are evolving very well, so 8 or 10 years could last perfectly well". Seventy percent of the white rufete used to make this wine comes from a 12-year-old vineyard, while the remaining 30 percent comes from 110-year-old vines in different parts of Villanueva at an altitude of around 750 metres.
El Pocito
Our first contact with the white Rufete came to Guía Peñín in its 2015 edition thanks to the winery La Zorra, through a varietal blend wine called 8 vírgenes. Two years later came its first single-varietal wine, La Zorra La Novena Rufete Blanco, a wine that was labelled as a table wine. Today it is the turn of Viñas del Cámbrico, which is making a commitment to this varietal from within, which will benefit the region as a whole and will lead to a significantly larger production explosion.
Viñas del Cámbrico Rufete Blanca 2019 is currently the best example of this variety tasted by the Peñín Guide, a wine that is the result of intense work and that will encourage other producers in the region. We can say that the white universe of the Sierras de Salamanca has just been born, as it were, and it has done so with a variety that was there all along.
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