It's baking hot in summer and freezing cold in winter; the open, windy expanses of Spain's Castilian plateau are a harsh place to make wine. But that extreme variation is the key to white wines that combine ripeness and acidity, and the wide horizons of the Castilian wine region of Rueda have given birth to a modern Spanish classic. It's Belondrade y Lurton. 

The Belondrade story began in the 1990s, when Hispanophile Frenchman Didier Belondrade (pictured centre) spotted the hidden potential of Rueda's Verdejo grape variety. Once upon a time Verdejo was used to make sherry-style oxidized whites. It almost disappeared in the wake of the invading American wine aphid phylloxera; later it enjoyed a 20th century reinvention making crisp, fresh whites. Didier Belondrade's inspiration was to realise Verdejo had the potential to go a step further. He began vinifying Rueda Verdejo with barrel fermentation and aging, to make a white wine in the Burgundian idiom. The result was a storming success. Pretty soon, critic Robert Parker referred to Belondrade y Lurton as 'one of the two greatest dry whites being made in Spain'.

These days, Didier's son Jean (pictured left) is running the show. Winemaker Marta Baquerizo (pictured right) has been making the wines since 1999, and the consistency she achieves is impressive. Jean describes the precision they needed to make the 2022 vintage, when a dry year meant concentrated grapes, but irregular ripening: 'The difficulty of the vintage was training the pickers only to pick the bunches that were perfectly ripe. They had to enter some plots up to four times as if it were a Sauternes harvest.' The results are as elegant and poised as ever. The 2022 opens on a mix of lemon and stonefruit notes, before revealing fennel, beeswax and the discreet signature of some very posh oak. It's a stunning wine that proves that world-class wines can sometimes arise from unexpected places.  We're delighted that Jean has chosen Uncorked to bring Belondrade y Lurton to the UK. /NT