A respected winemaker in Ribera del Duero, Tomás Postigo was behind the Pago de Carraovejas wines between 1988 and 2008. In the 2009 vintage, he decided to set up on his own. His four sons, who are gradually joining the business, ensure the house’s continuity.

Postigo’s vision of Ribera has not changed much over time. He champions blends both in terms of sites and varieties. Grapes are sourced from several villages across the appellation like Moradillo de Roa, Fuentenebro, Olmedillo or Pesquera with a predilection for vineyards on the moorland or on high-elevation sites. He likes to blend Tempranillo with international varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec because, he says, they add the brio and acidity that the indigenous variety often lacks in this area.

Although grapes were bought from purveyors in the early days, Postigo has devoted the last five years to grow his own vines -he currently owns 25 hectares scattered across the villages of Peñafiel, Curiel de Duero and Castrillo de Duero. The goal is to cover their needs in terms of international varieties. “Growers are not fond of Cabernet because this variety requires you do green pruning twice. Even if we pay high prices, they need to do twice as much work as with Tempranillo,” he adds.

In 2019 Postigo planted a 14-hectare vineyard with Cabernet, Merlot and Malbec right on the moorland, at 850 metres above sea level, which he had to fence off to protect it from roe deer. At a slightly lower elevation, Postigo owns another plot planted with a wide array of Tempranillo clones, but his favourite so far is the low-yielding A1 which was introduced by the University of Davis. He tries to avoid green flavours in Merlot; as for Malbec (now with upwards of 3.5 hectares), its liveliness, acidity and floral violet aromas make it a very dominant variety, so Postigo only blends it in small quantities.

The functional, well-equipped winery in Peñafiel was designed, he says, to ensure that "seeds do not crush and remain intact throughout the whole process. This way, we avoid astringency and have long-lived wines". Soft destemming results in almost intact berries and vinification is done with crane-operated gravity-led tanks that avoid pumping and allows délestage (rack and return) as a softer way of extraction. They work with their own selection of yeasts to achieve lower pH levels. Grape varieties are fermented separately but blending is usually done before the wines are transferred to barrels for aging or during the first stages of ageing.

Now that seasoned oak emerges as a dominant trend, Postigo continues to age his red wines in brand new barrels and is a great advocate of malolactic fermentation in barrels. He says it works best to stabilise colour and gain complexity, to have sweeter tannins and to increase the wines’s life span. Indifferent to passing fads, the limited production Tomás Postigo Vinificación Integral (1,500 bottles, €175) is aged in 200% new oak and released exclusively in magnum bottles.

The winery produces about 300,000 bottles a year. The wines follow the area’s classic style but stand out for their precision and refined texture; the impact of the oak is usually tempered by some cellaring time. The flagship red, which is usually aged for 12 months, has been renamed Tomás Postigo 3º Año (€28), which means it is released three years after the vintage. This nomenclature, used in the past by Vega Sicilia and many Rioja producers, - makes this wine stand out from other run-of-the-mill Crianzas and Reservas. The 5º Año (€43, some 15,000 bottles), which was released some time before 3º Año and is not produced every year, is the same wine with 36 months of bottle aging. The range also comprises the rare Tomás Postigo Rebollo red, aged in Spanish oak and only available in magnum (1,500 bottles, €125) and an old-vine Verdejo made from Segovia that it is sold outside the seal of DO Rueda (14,000 bottles, €20).

Postigo regards Ribera del Duero as a great success story, one with a phenomenal growth rate, but warns of a polarisation in the area. “The gap between good and mediocre wines is widening, a fact that is having a direct impact in the price of grapes, which for a long time used to be more homogeneous,” he says.