Fuentes del Silencio

Some of these vines are planted over a former Roman gold working, and particles of gold still turn up in the water of the Jamuz.

The winery was set up by Miguel Ángel Alonso and María José Galera in 2013 in Herreros de Jamuz, in the south of the province of León, and it belongs to Grandes Pagos de España.

What they do is bring old vineyard back: hundred-year-old vines, some of them pre-phylloxera, and the varieties of the district — mencía, prieto picudo, alicante bouschet, gran negro, palomino and doña blanca. There are 30 hectares spread across more than a hundred micro-plots, farmed organically.

The cellar is a traditional Leonese building dug into the rock, surrounded by its own vines.

Las Quintas comes from the northern moor of the valley, on very poor silt and sand, where the cold currents off Monte Teleno give the widest day-to-night temperature swing in the area. It is picked by hand into 15-kilo crates, vatted crate by crate with 75% whole clusters in frustoconical French oak vats, macerates 40 days with native yeast and ages 14 months in 500-litre barrels.