Why it matters
The producer
Bodegas Fariña farms over 300 hectares of estate vineyard in D.O. Toro, a red wine appellation on the high plateau of Castilla y León, and makes its wines from a single grape: Tinta de Toro, the local form of Tempranillo that has adapted over centuries to this dry, windswept corner of northwestern Spain. The family is now in its third generation. It also helped write the rules that govern the appellation it calls home.
The winery started in 1942 under Salvador Fariña and his wife Tomasa López, trading as Bodegas Porto. Twenty-six years later, their son Manuel returned from oenology training and changed almost everything except the grape. He harvested earlier, cooled the fermentation tanks, and began producing a lighter, more aromatic style of Toro than the region had ever bottled. In 1987 he became the first president of the D.O. Toro regulatory board. By then the family's argument about what Toro wine could be had become, in part, the argument the appellation itself was making to the world.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
D.O. Toro sits inland on a plateau roughly 700 metres above sea level, west of Valladolid and east of the Portuguese border. Summers are extreme: scorching days, cold nights. The diurnal gap preserves acidity in the grapes even as the heat drives ripeness. Rainfall is low. Tinta de Toro, grown here long enough to develop thicker skins and smaller berries than Tempranillo elsewhere, handles those conditions without losing freshness, which is why the wines carry more colour and grip than their counterparts from Rioja while still finishing with enough acid to balance the fruit.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
All 300-plus hectares are estate-owned and farmed directly, giving the winery control over harvest timing from picking through to cellar. Vine age on the Lágrima bottling runs 20 to 40 years. The harvest is manual.
In the cellar, fermentation runs at 25 degrees Celsius in stainless steel tanks. Controlled temperature at that level preserves the floral and red fruit aromatics in Tinta de Toro that higher temperatures cook away. The Lágrima bottling receives a seven-day maceration before the wine moves into French and American oak barrels for six months. The 1,800-plus oak barrels held in the cellars support a range that runs from this entry-level expression through the Colegiata tier to the Gran Colegiata flagship. Oak contact across the range is designed for integration rather than flavour addition: the aim is body and texture, not barrel character sitting on top of fruit.
Wines to know
The range in view
Every bottle in the Fariña range is varietal Tinta de Toro. The architecture runs three tiers.
Fariña Lágrima is the base expression and the oak-aged entry point. Grapes come from manually harvested parcels of 20 to 40 year old vines. After stainless steel fermentation, six months in French and American oak adds a layer of vanilla and cocoa behind the primary berry fruit without turning the wine woody. At 13.5 percent alcohol, it sits below the levels traditional Toro commanded before Manuel Fariña's interventions.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
Fariña Lágrima is the right first bottle. It is 100 percent Tinta de Toro from 20 to 40 year old vines, manually harvested, fermented cool in stainless steel, then six months in French and American oak. It finishes at 13.5 percent alcohol. It shows the Toro grape without the intimidating weight that the old high-alcohol style carried, and it shows what Manuel Fariña's 1968 intervention actually changed. Start here.