Skip to main content

Meet the winemaker - Daniel Castaño


Do you remember when you first started working with Averys?
It was back in 2001, with Castaño Red, Hecula, Coleccion (Vinas Viejas) and our Sweet Monastrell wine.

That’s 17 years ago, so it’s hard to believe there are any customers who haven’t tried your wines yet! But for those customers who haven’t, what can they expect?
They can expect such a great experience in both white and especially red wines, and great value for money. We make beautiful, fruity wines with great concentration, and wines that can be paired with lots of different types of dishes.

The Castaño family has been a pioneer of the Yecla region - what makes this region so special?
Due to our soil and weather conditions, (it’s especially dry all year round) we obtain reds that are deep in colour and very concentrated with soft tannins in the middle palate. Monastrell also gets very nice acidity, so the wines are very well balanced and give real pleasure on our palate.

What do you think it is about Hecula that has made it such a huge success?
Value for money is crucial to its success and it still remains one of the key wines from Southern Spain. Non- irrigated bush vines averaging 50 years old at 750m elevation, are the key part of it.

You’re a regular visitor at our annual Celebration of Wine tasting – what is it that keeps you coming back for more?!
We enjoy seeing people enjoying the wines, and that will make us take part in the tastings for many more years!!!!

You can Meet Daniel sooner too: at the Castaño Dinner on the 14th March

Here are a group of our Personal Wine Advisors on a visit in November

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

10 wines that tell the Averys story - Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Chardonnay,

6. Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Chardonnay Next up in our ‘10 wines that tell the Averys story’ is Tyrrell’s Vat 47 Chardonnay, the wine that put Australian Chardonnay on the world wine map. It’s hard to believe that fifty years ago, you couldn’t buy a bottle of Australian Chardonnay – even in Australia – it simply didn’t exist. The first commercially released Australian Chardonnay was Tyrrell’s Vat 47 1971. The story goes that Murray Tyrrell jumped the fence of the Penfolds HVD Pokolbin vineyard in the middle of the night to steal vine cuttings of Chardonnay (he’d already asked politely but as they’d refused, this was his only other option!) These cuttings reputedly went on to become the basis for Vat 47. Whether this is true or not is debatable but it certainly makes a good story! Since then, Tyrrell’s has become an Australian wine legend and that’s thanks in no small part to our very own John Avery. “The connection with the Avery family went back into the 1950s and John played...

10 wines that tell the Avery Story No 5.

5. Penfolds Grange The fifth   of our ‘10 wines that tell the Averys story’ is Australia’s iconic Penfolds Grange, known as ‘Penfolds Grange Hermitage’ until the 1989 vintage. It was 1965 when a young John Avery arrived in Australia for the very first time. So rare was it for a wine merchant from the UK to visit Australia back then that he was greeted at the airport by journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald and Sydney Daily Telegraph keen to find out why he was visiting Australia and get his views on Australian wine. “ I’ve come to Australia to taste your wines as I haven’t had a good one yet.” His reply may have not been the most diplomatic but Aussie wine producers rushed to change his mind including Max Lake (Lake’s Folly), Brian McWilliam (McWilliams), Richard Hill-Smith (Yalumba) and Max Schubert (Penfolds). He toured Australia in a 1938 Rolls Royce and discovered that in fact, there were lots of exciting wines being made. So much so, that he wrote a...

Rhone 2017 Vintage Report

2017 - Small but perfectly formed Good things come in small packages goes the cliché, well cliché or not, the overall picture of the Rhone in 17 is one of reduced volumes, but broadly (whisper it) excellent quality; both North to South. In fact, the mantra being repeated by a number of vignerons I met in the sweltering conditions of August whilst travelling the region, was that the vintage in qualitative terms is parked somewhere between that of the duelling titanic years of 2015 & 2016. After regaling this sentiment to a colleague on my return, the reply was one of ‘that’s not a bad place to be’, well indeed, and from my stand point I’d struggle not to concur. This was a viewpoint echoed North to South. As ever lumping the entire all-encompassing Rhone region into one rigid narrative, or stylistic summary is almost impossible. One only has to appreciate the different natural surroundings of the split region. The north being the home of beautiful terraced vineyards, stark...