Venta Las Vacas

The vineyards of Venta Las Vacas covers a range of altitudes and soils. High alititude slopes consist of a mixture of limestone dominated soil while the other sites contain more more reddish clay. This topography provides a wide range of grapes for Venta Las Vacas to blend from and the result is a remarkable complex wine.

The Venta Las Vacas Project was created in 2009. The wine, a straight Tinta del País (Tempranillo), is produced by Juan Carlos Vizcarra. The grapes are sourced from several vineyards located in Tras de San Pedro and Las Arras close to Mambrilla de Castrejón in Burgos province. The Ribera del Duero region has moderate to low rainfall, dry summers, long, harsh winters and very wide diurnal temperature variation throughout the year.

Venta Las Vacas is sourced from 18 to 23 year-old trellised vines covering 7 hectares (17 acres) of claylimestone soils. Each hectare produces an average yield of 4,500kg of grapes. The grapes are harvested by hand in October with only the finest bunches being selected for vinification.

Venta Las Vacas is are then vinified at the Bodegas Vizcarra winery, where the bunches are carefully checked on a sorting table to ensure that only the highest quality grapes are vinified. Following this manual sorting, the grapes are placed into small mobile stainless steel bins, which are lifted by a crane towards the top of the fermentation vats, thus enabling the complete process to be done using gravity flow.

The grapes are de-stemmed without undergoing any process of crushing.
The berries then go into vat where they undergo a prefermentation cold soak for 5 days at 12°C. The alcoholic and malo-lactic fermentations then take place in semi-open 160-hectolitre stainless steel vats and in oak barrels, 20% of which are new oak and the rest second and third-fill oak barrels.

The wine is aged onits fine lees for 10 to 12 months in new, second-fill and third-fill 225, 300 and 400-litre medium-toasted oak barrels, 40% of which are American oak and 60% French oak. During this time, 2 rackings are done.

Venta Las Vacas has been selected by many Michelin star restaurants, including four Michelin 2-star restaurants and twelve Michelin 1-star restaurants.

Venta Las Vacas has received high ratings constantly from different organisations. High ratings received were RP 90 and GP 93.