AALTO was created in February 1999 when Mariano García – who had been Vega Sicilia’s winemaking director for 30 years- and Javier Zaccagnini- for 6 years head of Ribera del Duero’s Consejo Regulador-decided to join their expertise to make a new wine.
Their goal was, from the very beginning, to exhibit a distinct personality in their wines and to reach the quality of the best wines in the world in a lapse of 15 to 20 years.
Thanks to the financial support of several Spanish wine enthusiasts and investors, a modern winery was designed and built in Quintanilla de Arriba (Valladolid – Spain), following strict criteria to ensure optimal winemaking conditions: we use a low temperature chamber to cool harvested grapes prior to de-stemming and harness gravity to move grapes and musts around the winery, thus avoiding aggressive pumps. We ferment in wood and stainless steel tanks. Our two underground oak-ageing halls offer excellent natural conditions for barrel ageing and allow perfect malolactic fermentation in wood.
AALTO is based on three solid pillars:
- The exceptional quality of old Tinto Fino clones.
- The considerable complexity of our soils combined with the microclimate of our region.
- The winemaking talent and vast experience of Mariano García.
We now cultivate 130 hectares of old block Tinto Fino vineyards (Tinto Fino is Tempranillo which has adapted over the centuries to Ribera del Duero’s climate and soils) in 7 different villages within the province of Burgos, and 20 hectares of younger Tinto Fino vines planted by us in 2 villages in the province of Valladolid, all of them within the Denominación de Origen Ribera del Duero. The age of the old vines ranges from 40 to 100 years old.
The grapes are picked by hand in small, 15 kg plastic boxes and brought immediately to the winery. There we use two grape-selection conveyor belts where the grapes are thoroughly inspected before they enter the de-stemmer. As early as December the wine goes into French barriques and is kept there with weekly control and refilling. Part of the wine goes through malolactic fermentation in new oak, with daily batonnage.
We keep the harvest from each individual vineyard separate throughout the vinification and subsequent ageing period in oak. Mariano García decides the final assemblage of wines when he considers each individual lot has reached its optimum moment for bottling. We do not filter our wines.
AALTO wines is the result of our extremely careful selection of grapes and expert winemaking. It is a wine of high quality and will be offered every year, except in those when we decide that the climate has not allowed for a perfect ripening of the grapes. The average oak ageing for AALTO is 17 months in 50% new French barrels and 50% one or two year old French and American barrels.
In spite of its youth, AALTO winery has been on an unstoppable course to place its wines among the best in the world since its founding in 1999, and it has been so that both of its wines AALTO and AALTO PS have been awarded very high ratings by the most prestigious and influential wine critics at national and international level.
Since 1988 Wine Spectator reveals each year its Top 100 list. In this list the editor selects the most exciting wines from thousands of wines reviewed during the course of the year. In December 2015, Wine Spectator ranked AALTO 2012 as the sixth best wine in the world, selected from a total of more than 18,000 wines that were tasted for this 2015 selection. Although this is a tremendous recognition, it is only one of many that AALTO has received over the past sixteen years.
Today AALTO is widely regarded as one of the leading wineries in Ribera del Duero and the winery has recently been selected in Paris as one of the Best 100 wineries in the world in Michel Bettane’s and Thiery Dessauve’s published book.
AAlto