Bodegas y Viñedos Ponce

Juan Antonio Ponce set up the winery in 2005, aged twenty-three, with eleven barrels and a loan. Before that he had spent five years as Telmo Rodríguez's right-hand man at his company, which he joined at twenty-one and left having seen other regions and other varieties.

He studied oenology at the Escuela de Viticultura y Enología in Requena. His father had inherited bush-trained bobal vines over eighty years old in Iniesta, and on that he built the house.

Today he makes some 150,000 bottles a year across eleven labels, with bobal as almost the sole protagonist. The vineyards are farmed biodynamically and the cellar works with little sulphur.

The P.F. comes from 3.6 hectares across three plots that carry «pie franco» in their names — P.F. Lincha, P.F. Olivares and P.F. Gallo — with ungrafted vines around eighty-five years old, at 850 metres, facing north-west and on sandy soil. It is 100% bobal.

It ferments with its own yeasts in 4,500-litre French oak vats and ages ten months in those same vats. It is neither fined nor filtered.