2024 Parajes del Valle Bobal Rosado Manchuela Spain 750 ml

Most people’s mental map of Spanish rosé begins and ends with Garnacha from Navarra, which is a fine place to start but not much of a place to stop. A few hours southeast, in a high, landlocked plateau called Manchuela, a young winemaker named María Jover Sánchez is making a case for Bobal—a grape so long overlooked that it spent most of the 20th century anonymously propping up bulk blends rather than starring in wines of its own. The case she’s making is pretty compelling.

Here’s the thing about Bobal: it’s actually Spain’s second most planted red grape, behind only Tempranillo. Almost nobody outside of Spain can name it, and that’s largely by design. For decades, it was harvested in enormous quantities, shipped in tanker trucks, and blended into other regions’ wines without a word of credit on the label. Then came vine-pull schemes in the 1990s, when the Spanish government encouraged growers to rip out Bobal and replant with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Plantings dropped by nearly half. What survived—the vines nobody bothered to uproot because they sat on steep, rocky ground or belonged to stubborn old farmers who refused—turned out to be some of the most interesting fruit in the country.

Jover trained at Vega Sicilia before coming home to the Levante, and the seriousness she absorbed there shows in how she works. Parajes del Valle farms certified organic old vines—averaging around 50 years—in the traditional goblet style, dry-farmed on clay-limestone soils at 600 to 800 meters above sea level. The winery sources its fruit through the terraje system, a sharecropping arrangement as old as the region itself, in which growers tend the vines and return a share of the harvest to landowners. It’s a fragile system—modern economics have been quietly dismantling it for years—and Parajes del Valle pays above market price to keep it intact. The oldest vines in Manchuela exist partly because of commitments like this one.

For the rosé, Jover presses the Bobal directly, without maceration, and ferments with native yeasts in concrete—the kind of hands-off approach that only works when the raw material is genuinely good.