The town is called Villálvaro, in the province of Soria, at the easternmost end of the Ribera del Duero. It rises near the headwaters of the river, on the gentle slopes of the Sierra de la Demanda, the mountains that separate Castilla from Rioja. On a sunny day in late winter, the streets in town are empty at noon.
Just over a hundred people live here. And there are no children. The school near the main square has been closed. Mariano López and his wife, Laura, take me on a tour of the town, where, since 2017, they have been bottling wines from their old vineyards surrounding Villálvaro.
Mariano describes the good times, when the town’s lagares were still working and everyone went there with their grapes to make wine. Today, most of the thick, handhewn beams that used to work the wine presses are gone, neglected as people left for the cities, then destroyed by the passage of time. Some, like the one he later showed me in his cellar, are little more than a tourist attraction. “But the old men of the town keep making their wines,” he says.
Three of those old men are sitting on a bench in the central plaza, in silence, in the shade, watching the day pass in front of them. Suddenly all three men seem to be interested in our conversation. One of them, Hilario Carazo, stands up and asks me if I would be interested in trying some of the wine he makes. Carazo has gray hair, carelessly combed back. He wears a red shirt stamped with two or three wine stains, and a jacket a couple of sizes larger than he is now entitled to. “I make clarete,” he says quietly, as if it were an apology.
Before the 1980s, when Ribera del Duero officially became a Denomination of Origin, before the modern wineries were constructed to produce wines that would compete with Rioja as the other great reds of Spain, what people drank here was the opposite of any big red. Their “clarete” was a light, fruity wine with a low alcohol content, a blend of white grapes (especially albillo) and red (especially tempranillo), stored in old barrels where it would remain until the grower finished drinking it. Clarete was the wine of celebrations and the wine of lunches on any day of the week. People would drink it from jugs to quench their thirst while working in the fields. It was a wine without ambitions.
There is a small lagar on the dirt floor of Carazo’s cellar, where he brings the grape harvest from his vineyards on the outskirts of town. “What grows there is twenty percent white, and the rest are reds, I think…,” he says, smiling.
Carazo crushes the grapes and leaves them in the lagar, in the darkness of the cellar for a couple of days, stirring them occasionally, and then drains them into a few barrels that rest against the cement walls of the cellar. “And that’s it,” he says.
“Tell the journalist how long it takes you to drink all this, Hilario,” López says from the cellar door. They joke, while Carazo takes a glass and plunges it into one of the barrels.
“It depends on the friends, but here we normally drink about two gallons a day.” He responds with another smile, this time followed by a small laugh that infects all of us. His voice sounds slightly mushy, his cheeks with the red blush of someone who has already had at least half of that daily dose.
The clarete Carazo gives me to taste smells of red, crunchy fruits. Its soft, refreshing sensation in the mouth makes it impossible not to give the wine a second sip, and then another, until the glass is empty. I have admired the wines of Ribera del Duero for decades. I have fallen to my knees before the complexity and depth of some of them. But, as far as I can remember, I have never felt what I feel there, with the wine from this old, soft-spoken man. “And could I taste the wine from that other barrel, Hilario?”
We leave Carazo and his friends to continue on to the López’s winery, two or three streets away, in the silence of Villálvaro. Compared to Carazo’s cave, López’s operation looks like something out of a science-fiction movie. Everything is shiny, even that imposingly thick beam that once served to press the grapes of a town that had many wines. Before the Lópezes launched Señorío de Villálvaro in 2017, they made wine for their own consumption, like everyone in town. Now, their winery is registered with the Denomination of Origin. The wines they produce are like nothing their neighbors have tasted before, such as a tempranillo aged in barrels for a year. It’s a good red wine that the DO council has approved without hesitation. But the wine I’m most impressed with is their clarete.
Until 2018, they called it rosé, but a change in the D.O. now allows “clarete” to be included on the label. Their blend is 50-50 albillo and tempranillo. As in Carazo’s wine, the grapes are cofermented, but the proportions are different. “It is my grandfather’s recipe,” López says. “We wanted to make it this way to continue his tradition, so that it wouldn’t get lost.” The clarete he makes is almost the same in character as Carazo’s—that same simplicity of fruit and freshness—and it evokes in me the same desire to continue drinking it as if it were juice.
After we leave the winery, the three old men are still in town, waiting for us. “Now it’s my turn,” Anastasio Romero tells me, seeming almost grim. We head to his cellar, a much neater place than Carazo’s, the walls painted white, the barrels perfectly arranged on pedestals. “He is the mayor’s husband,” Carazo jokes, and we all laugh as Romero offers a taste of his wines. He cuts some chorizo, although he warns us that he will not give us more because his friends have already eaten almost all of it. The juicy clarete awakens all the spices and herbs of the chorizo, as if a light was pointed at that meat. Romero’s rough and serious manner changes a bit when we all celebrate his wine. Even Ezequiel de Blas, the quietest of the three old men, smiles with his head down.
De Blas’s winery is in the upper part of the town, a dark shed with high ceilings and adobe walls. In it, there are all kinds of things in various states of disrepair and, separated from all that disorder, in a corner, are his barrels. De Blas’s face is tanned, with deep wrinkles from years of work under Villálvaro’s intense sun. His clarete is the most fragile of the three, the lightest but also the most perfumed. He does not remember what percentages of albillo the blend has, but he does know that all his friends like it and drink it easily, that they spend hours there, sitting in those rickety chairs, in the darkness of the cellar, only illuminated by the wine’s glowing fruits.
RIBERA CLARETE
Ribera del Duero’s clarete is a hidden gem, a wine that would cause a stir in most hipster bars in New York. And its history runs deep.
“Clarete is something that we will always value because it is the wine that has brought us to where we are today,” Enrique Pascual García, the president of the Ribera del Duero Denomination, tells me over the phone, explaining why the Consejo decided to add clarete to the list of authorized wine styles. “It is what allowed all those vines not to be uprooted when the economic situation was very difficult in the region, before the creation of the DO.”
Now that local law permits the use of the word clarete on labels, other producers have also started producing their own claretes, each with their own recipe. Goyo García Viadero is one of them. He makes his version by bleeding the tempranillo grapes from a 56-year-old vineyard in the heights of Villanueva de Gumiel, in Burgos. His clarete is easy to drink and full of fruit.
You might get a similar sensation from the clarete of Dominio del Aguila. Winemaker Jorge Monzón chooses his grapes from a very old vineyard, a field blend of around 20 varieties, among them tempranillo and albillo, but also airén, moscatel, pirulés, monastrell, garnacha and bobal. He waits for the albillo to ripen, and then harvests everything together. The result is another shining beauty, filled with refreshing red fruit.
is the author of Descorchados, an annual guide to the wines of South America, and covers Chile for W&S.
This story appears in the print issue
of August 2020.
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