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In La Horra, a town located in the heart of the Ribera del Duero, we can find the family winery Tinto Figuero, with decades of history in the Ribera del Duero PDO (Spain). La Horra is located on the right bank of the river, within what is called Gold Diamond due to its unique microclimates and soils.

The García Figuero family produces seven wines from more than 110 plots spread over a radius of four kilometers around the winery. They are unique and different wines: three of them follow the classification based on the months of aging (Roble, Crianza and Reserva) and the other four are local wines and/or unique plots of vineyards planted between 1910 and 1965. Committed to the sustainable viticulture, they make their wines only with “the tempranillo from the La Horra area”. At the controls of the team of oenologists Oscar Rodríguez and Jean François Hèbrard, as external consultant.

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The winery was born from the illusion of José María García and his wife Milagros Figuero and became a reality in 2001 with the support of their three children: Carlos, Henar and Antonio and their respective spouses Esther, J. Felipe and Pilar. Its purpose? Create the best wines while respecting the uniqueness of each plot and each area. Today they celebrate their success with the incorporation of the third generation in the person of Cristina, daughter of Henar and J. Felipe.

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The management of the winery, the marketing of the wines, the communication and the plans for the future fall into their hands.

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The winery, which in 2016 was chosen as one of the 100 best in the world by the prestigious magazine Wines & Spirits, chooses as its Christmas proposal Figuero Viñas Viejas (27 euros), a 100% Tempranillo wine made with material from the Paraje de Zaloña , in the town of La Horra (DO Ribera del Duero). Its great presence of red fruits that are interspersed with spicy and roasted notes make it ideal for Christmas dinners, which are more copious and long than normal ones.

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At Tinto Figuero we understand that our wines are natural products, the result of manual work and traditional aging. They are wines that never stop evolving, which is why they need time in the bottle to round off and find their own balance, to reach their maximum expression and become a superior quality wine.

Part of our job is to provide you with the perfect travel companions such as glass and natural cork.

Since when do wine, glass and cork travel together?

The tandem wine, glass and cork originated millions of years ago. In ancient times, the Greeks and Romans used corks to close their amphorae, however, with the rise of wooden barrels, the use of cork was lost giving way to wooden stoppers.
Over time, the wine has changed its container until it has reached glass bottles, first for service and later for storage. It was in this last stage in the 17th century that Dom Pierre Pérignon, a French Benedictine monk, considered what the best closure for these bottles was.
The story goes that during one of his pilgrimages he was able to observe how the pilgrims closed their vessels with corks in an almost hermetic way, so that he began to study the benefits of cork, reopening a world before our eyes.

What is cork? Where does it come from?

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Cork is a completely natural raw material extracted from the bark of the cork oak (Querqus Suber) and its unique properties give it unprecedented qualities. It is light, impermeable to liquids and gases, elastic, compressible, etc. In addition, it is completely biodegradable, renewable and recyclable, being very useful for preserving natural habitats, indigenous populations and biodiversity.

The cork has the ability to let the wine breathe, leaving the container that contains it airtight.

It is a sustainable material, it is not necessary to cut the cork oak, but it regenerates autonomously. The most interesting thing is that to make cork, the cork oak needs to absorb a lot of CO2 through photosynthesis. This means that corks can offset the carbon footprint of 75 cl glass bottles, which release between three and five hundred grams of CO2 each, depending on their weight.

What types of cork do we use at Tinto Figuero?

Natural cork

Natural corks are extracted from the cork oak from a single strip. In this way, an optimal seal is guaranteed, allowing the correct evolution of the wines through micro-oxygenation.

At Tinto Figuero we work exclusively with natural corks for different reasons:

Why smell the cork before tasting a wine?

If we stop to analyze a natural cork, we can see the manufacturer’s seal, its porosity and elasticity, and its stain. But the way to understand all these variables is to contextualize them.

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Just as a young wine will have different aromatic and visual nuances than a wine that is aged, the same thing will happen with the cork. The visual phase of a tasting predisposes us to a situation that the nose will reveal to us later.

That is why when opening a bottle of wine you should smell the cork. The most important thing is to find clean aromas typical of the wine. The varietal aromas that we will find in a Tinto Figuero will be black fruits, liquorice, sweet spices.

But what aromas tell us that something is not right? All those memories of humidity, fungus or even mushroom. In this situation we can find ourselves facing a guard or TCA problem.