As Jaime Echevarri of the most cosmopolitan producer, Finca Museum, described their top vineyard to me, 'it's similar to Châteauneuf-du-Pape but with concrete underneath'. Another producer, Enrique Concejo, claims that the soils responsible for their Carraduenas bottling are more like Pomerol. Either way, the rash of hopeful, new exporting producers here do not lack ambition.
Typically, César Príncipe made dark pink clarete for the bars of Valladolid for years until their oenologist persuaded them that the quality of the region's dark-skinned grapes – mainly Tempranillo with a little Garnacha Tinta (the juicier Grenache) – was far too good to be diluted by the local Albillo and Verdejo white grapes. But it was two women, itinerant winemaker Ana Martín, and María Pinacho, who claim responsibility for 'the first modern red Cigales'. Their Translanzas is a dense, spicy, ageworthy wine made from a Tempranillo vineyard planted in 1940.
The late 1990s saw a flurry of incomers and locals who woke up to the vinous possibilities of these old vines and the harsh climate, but none was more dramatic than the arrival in 1999 of representatives from the publicly quoted Baron de Ley in Rioja way to the east, owners of Spain's biggest branded Rioja El Coto. General manager Echevarri admits that they actually wanted to expand into Ribera del Duero, but left it so late that prices were already silly. They planned to take a look over the border at port country in the Douro Valley in Portugal but Spanish wine writer Andres Proensa suggested the company prospectors stop off in Cigales.
'We were immediately fascinated by what we found,' he told me while driving me at high speed towards the region in his top of the range BMW. (The young lady who represents Cigales wine region drives a small white van.) 'We saw a purity that was unique in Spain - not spoilt in the sense of Rioja. The land was terribly fragmented but the quality was such that it was worth doing lots of individual negotiations. We contracted 60% of the vineyards over 60 years old for 10 years. That meant 800 hectares, but with average yields of only one to two tonnes per hectare, it was not that much wine. The Castilians are a bit like the Scots - very suspicious and closed. They called us 'los Americanos' at first because the contract guy was blonde.
'The grapes here may be Tempranillo, as in Rioja, but they're much thicker-skinned and need very different winemaking. After 10 years, we're just learning how to crack it.' In 2000 Baron de Ley started work, on top of a hill, on a 15-million euro ('probably too much') palace of a bodega for their new Museum project in Cigales. To say that it is different from the Cigales norm would be an understatement.
But they have cleverly recruited Isaac Fernandez, nephew of famed winemaker Mariano García, who has already made wine at his uncle's Mauro bodega and in Bierzo to the north west, whose wines he thinks lack the structure he finds in Cigales. Museum has the muscle to get the name Cigales known in markets such as the US, surely an asset for the growing number of accomplished producers in this small but characterful region.
