Pago de los Capellanes

The name is literal. In the Middle Ages the chaplains of Pedrosa de Duero owned vineyards there, and in time one of them passed to the Rodero family. In the twentieth century it was worked by Doroteo Rodero with his son Paco, the only one of five siblings who wanted to keep the vines.

Paco Rodero and his wife, Conchita Villa, recovered and enlarged the vineyard and for years sold the grapes. One of their customers, Benjamín Pérez Pascuas, encouraged them to make their own wine, and in 1996 they founded the winery.

Today it is run by their daughter Estefanía Rodero Villa, an architect who worked in Chile before coming back to the family winery. The house also makes wine in Valdeorras, where it produces O Luar do Sil, a Godello.

The Reserva is Tempranillo from the family's own vineyards in Pedrosa de Duero, on clay-limestone soils. It has a six-day cold soak, ferments for thirty days in 20,000-litre tanks and ages eighteen months in new French oak, racked every six months, in an underground cellar ten metres deep. It is bottled unfined and unfiltered.