Vera de Estenas is one of Spain’s most exciting wineries today. There are a number of reason explaining the its hold on wine lovers: part of the excitement stems from the many, very different, and excellent wines that Vera de Estenas makes; part of it is also the result of the winery using grape varieties that were either thought to be uncool (Bobal) or completely forgotten (Tardana), and is thereby able to offer jaded palates everywhere; and last but not least, part of that excitement is due to the discreet, elegant nature of its owners, a family that doesn’t need to appear on social media outlets every other minute, or be part of a rock band, or on every tail-wagging wine industry rag gushing all over the place telling us how the owners and technical staff are the greatest thing since the invention of pre-sliced bread. At Vera de Estenas, discretion and refinement are the key: the Martinez Roda family, owners of the estate, are very much normal people you are liable to meet on a vacation or at a restaurant, and even after conversing with them for a while, you’d still probably wouldn’t know they made wine for a living. You know, ‘less is more’ is not just an architectural concept, but also a pretty valid, not to mention refreshing, manner by which to live one’s life, as well as one by which not to impact on everybody else’s in tiresome ways.

The winery’s name, Vera de Estenas, means “by the river Estenas”; it is derived from a small river called Estenas that flows at the foot of the Sierra del Remedio mountains. The winery itself is located in the Utiel-Requena Denominacion about a forty-minute-drive inland from the seaside city of Valencia. It farms over forty hectares of vineyards planted at high altitudes (700-800 meters above sea level) on clay-calcareous soils. The high-altitude environment, strong solar radiation, plateaus and slopes and free-draining soils allow the grapes to reach full physiologic maturation easily. At 400-450 millimeters of annual rainfall, the vines grow in conditions of light water deprivation, which coupled with the generally poor soil nutrient reality, allow the grapes to concentrate their juice while curbing crop loads, a blessing for varieties like Bobal that would otherwise be very happy to produce tonnes (and in fact, Bobal was long used as a source of bulk wine production). The huge temperature swings and cold nights help the grapes preserve acidity, which makes for generally refreshing, vibrant wines. Last but not least, the intelligent combination of growing both native and international grapes means that Vera de Estenas is especially well-suited to meet the most varied market demands. After all, there are many in this world who would be perfectly happy never to drink another Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay wine in their lives: and similarly, there are many who literally seem like they cannot survive without drinking just those wines, and so at Vera de Estenas they offer a wine for every palate (as well as every pocketbook, which is an added bonus).

A little bit of history

Vera de Estenas was founded in 1945 by Francisco Martínez Bermell, who was to become a famoua winemaker and a President of the Spanish Oenologist Association. It was his great-grandfather, Don Pedro Pons, who had established a winery on Calle de Los Hierros of El Grao, in a district of Valencia. Bermell followed in the family footsteps and established Hijos de Pons Hermanos in Utiel; with the help and guidance of Don Pascual Carrión, director of the Requena Oenological Station, he further honed his winemaking skills while learning about his territory’s unique and potentially fine wine grapes, and how well-adapted they were to the region’s semi-arid climate and poor soil. By the mid-1980s, his sons were estate-bottling in the Casa Don Ángel cellar. Current owner Félix Martínez Roda, Francisco’s youngest son, guides the estate today along with nephew Edouardo. Felix often mentions Francisco’s mantra: that in order to make good wines, ‘there are no secrets, there’s simply the need to love wine.’ I have already written in the past that I once heard somebody describe the wines of Vera de Estenas as fueled by, or expressive of, “unpretentious classicism” and I’d say that is a very apt description of what are extremely solid, well-made wines that eschew modern gimmicks and deliver faithful expressions of grape varieties and site. Not surprisingly, the winery has grown successfully over the years, and now also is heavily involved in oenotourism (there is a a small, pretty, hotel with rooms for their guests: the rooms are not just named after the grape varieties used at the winery, but are in the same number as the varieties grown).

Milestones and wines of today

Beginning in 2021, Vera de Estenas was granted “vino de pago” status. Some of its wines bear that name on the label: this is the highest rating bestowed on Spanish wines, a term that refers to a single-vineyard wine that expresses unique traits and that is of a higher quality level than anything labeled DO or DOCa. At the time, Vera de Estenas was only one of twenty-five certified pagos in Spain.

Vera de Estenas is the owner of some of the oldest vineyards of Bobal in all of Spain. Bobal is the country’s third-most planted grape variety that had been reduced in modern times to making anonymous bulk wines or to be added to non-descript, entry-level blends. But at Vera de Estenas they have always bet on their local grape varieties and have done their best over the years to highlight and showcase the intrinsic qualities of each. But there’s more than just Bobal to enthuse about at Vera de Estenas: for example, it also farms and makes wine from the rare white grape Tardana (of which very few wineries still have any rows of anymore as the grape has largely been abandoned: Vera de Estenas is, to the best of my knowledge, one of maybe three producers currently making a monovariety wine with this grape). The family has organically farmed such vines for decades, thereby helping to preserve the production of Bobal and Tardana wines by traditional winemaking methods. Vera de Estensa also has a library cellar that is home to some of the oldest examples of Utiel-Requena’s Bobal wines, proving the grape variety’s potential to produce age-worthy wines of real finesse. And the Tardana wines, though not the last word in complexity, are delicious and easygoing. At the same time, Vera de Estenas also produces many excellent wines featuring Chardonnay, Merlot and Malbec, for example, and so the winery really does offer something for everyone.

The wines in this tasting report

All the wines in this report were tasted in Spain directly at the winery in the company of owner Felix Martinez Roda during my recent trip to the country this July 2026.