Husband-and-wife team Abel and Maite Mendoza are responsible for some astonishingly fine expressions of Rioja and its terroir. Abel handles the vineyards, Maite does the winery. Abel works 37 parcels around the village of San Vicente de la Sonsierra (which is the Sierra de Cantabria, near the border between Rioja Alta and Alavesa).

Abel Mendoza is unique for the range of white wines, with single varietal bottlings of Viura, Malvasia, Garnacha Blanca, Tempranillo Blanco and the particularly rare Torrontes – and then the 5V label blends all these varieties in an even more cellarworthy version. These are all fermented and aged in French oak for five months.

They only use French oak, and age their wines for shorter periods than is traditional in Rioja. They do not use any of the regional age regulations on their labels (such as Crianza or Reserva). They are very much wines about fruit and about terroir rather than wines about cellar regimes. The Jarrarte red is a traditional old-style carbonic maceration red (and a benchmark of this way of making wine). His Grano a Grano (berry by berry) are painstakingly handled – every single bunch is destemmed berry by berry, and by hand. Abel recalls with a chuckle the time that Rioja’s regulatory body sent an inspector to check that they really were doing it all by hand. He stood by the gate for two days, watching. When it comes to making good wine, says Abel, ‘the only recipe I have is work and more work’. (NT 04/09/23)