Wine Tasting near Valencia: a morning at an organic winery in Utiel-Requena

You are in Valencia for a few days, or you live here. You want to taste Spanish wine properly, with someone explaining what is in the glass, and you would rather not spend a whole day on a bus tour.

You do not need to travel to Rioja for that. Drive inland from Valencia for less than an hour and you are in vineyards.

Here is what to expect.

Bodegas Vegalfaro is in Requena, in the Utiel-Requena wine region, inland from the city of Valencia. Take the A-3 motorway towards Madrid and it is under an hour by car.

The road climbs as you go. Our vineyards sit at 680 metres in the valley of the Magro river, and that altitude is the whole point: nights stay cool even in August, and cool nights keep the acidity in the grape. It is why the wines from up here taste fresh rather than heavy, in a region most people picture as simply hot.

Bodegas Vegalfaro has been run by the same family since 1999. Rodolfo Valiente is the winemaker, and he is usually the one who shows you around.

The estate is certified organic. In practice that means no herbicides, living cover crops between the vines, our own compost, hand harvesting into small crates, and fermentation with the wild yeast that arrives on the grape skins rather than a commercial packet. It is slower and some years it yields less fruit. It is also the reason the wines taste of this particular place.

Most Spanish wine is classified by region: Rioja, Ribera del Duero, Utiel-Requena. Above all of those sits a rarer category called Vino de Pago, granted to a single estate whose vineyard is distinctive enough to earn its own protected designation.

There are very few in Spain. One of them is Pago de los Balagueses, our estate inside the Hoces del Cabriel Natural Park. So a tasting here is one of the few chances near Valencia to drink a Vino de Pago at the place it is made. That is not marketing language, it is a legal classification you can look up.

It varies with the season, but the tasting usually includes:

Bobal is worth the trip on its own. It is grown almost nowhere else, it was long treated as a bulk grape for blending, and it is only in the last two decades that anyone has made serious wine from it.

It includes a walk through the organic vineyards, an explanation of how the wines and the cava are made, and a guided tasting with a pairing of local cheeses and cured meats. We run it in English as well as Spanish — just tell us when you book. It is designed for adults.

Mornings are better in summer, when walking the vineyard at midday is no fun. Spring and autumn are the best months, and winter has its own quiet charm.

One thing to know: we close the winery to visits during harvest, in August and September. Those weeks the whole team is on the grapes. Plan your visit for the rest of the year.

And someone has to drive. It is a tasting rather than a lunch, but you will try several wines and the way back is a motorway. If nobody wants to drive, a taxi from Requena town is a reasonable option.