Alicante lays claim to the oldest D.O. in Spain and one of the oldest in Europe. In 1510, Ferdinand the Catholic King of Aragon decreed that only wine from Alicante could leave the city’s port, then a highly important strategic port in the Spanish Mediterranean. A process of certification guaranteeing Alicante’s wine origins, called ‘Junta de Inhibición del Vi Foraster d’Alacant’ (the council for preventing wines from outside of Alicante) was created in order to guarantee traceability, as Alicante wines were highly prized across Europe, especially in England, Scotland and Sweden. It was said that King Louis VI of France would only eat cake soaked in Alicante wine on his deathbed in 1715 and Alicante wine was more highly regarded in the 18th century than Sauternes, sherry and port.
This highly prized wine region was decimated when the phylloxera bug destroyed the vines at the end of the nineteenth century; winemaking in Alicante went into decline as 100,000 hectares were destroyed, never fully recovering. The past thirty years however has seen a number of people and organisations in the region help to create a renaissance in the world of Alicante winemaking. The Vinalopó area surrounding the town of Villena was one of the first places within D.O. Alicante to take a return to winemaking seriously; what follows is a modern-day snapshot of three of the region’s significant bodegas.
Las Virtudes, a co-operative founded in 1961, produces wine and olive oil similar to many co-operatives in the region. As Villena has expanded over the past sixty years the winery is now on the outskirts of town beside a hypermarket and a tile merchant, and the shop is always packed full of locals stocking up. As with many co-operatives in Spain, its winemaking made a huge leap forward in the 90s, ‘what happened here in the 90s, like many such wineries throughout Spain,’ says export manager Clara Menor, ‘is we decided to work with qualified professional winemakers for the first time and really explore what kind of wines our grapes could make, as well as experimenting with new varieties and different innovative winemaking techniques.’