SotoManrique

The name is made of the two family surnames, Soto and Manrique. Behind it is Jesús María Soto, «Chuchi», who had spent twenty-five years selling wine and working on winery projects in Spain and abroad, and who was one of the founders of Leda Viñas Viejas.

He came to Cebreros in 2016 looking for garnacha. Back then the wine of the area was sold in bulk and nobody cared about the granite of Gredos. He started by buying small vineyards and bringing them back one by one.

Today there are around 20 hectares of small plots, farmed organically, with garnacha at least seventy years old spread between 700 and 1,100 metres.

He also runs the Cebreros cooperative and makes the wine from its members' vineyards, some 240 hectares in all.

Alto de la Estrella comes from a 1.3-hectare plot planted in 1961 at 1,100 metres, on granite soil with bedrock close to the surface and a quartz vein running through it. It is 100% garnacha: it ferments in a concrete tank with forty-five days of vatting, is lightly pressed and ages fourteen months in 2,000-litre foudres. It is bottled unfiltered.