That was one of the more troubling revelations from an interview last week with Bodega Numanthia’s estate director Julio Rodriguez and head winemaker Jesús Jiménez.
Expecting the producers to mention heatwaves and drought as the major threats to viticulture in Toro, db came away surprised to learn that there is a different and more immediate challenge to the incredible pre-phylloxera plants in the region, which is located in Zamora, Castile and León, and home to a highly adapted, robust local clone of Tempranillo called Tinto de Toro.
These grapes are used by the property to make its deliciously rich and long-lived red wines, notably Numanthia’s flagship Termanthia – an expression from ungrafted vines with an average age of 120 years old.
However, due to financial assistance for installing solar panels on farmland, some landowners are opting to switch from grape-growing to supplying energy to the country’s grid because the returns are better.
As a result, one of the motivating forces driving Rodriguez and Jiménez to raise awareness for Toro’s wines from Tempranillo is a desire to preserve the region’s ancient vines, which are relics of viticulture as practised centuries ago.
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200 year-old ungrafted vines
“Some of the vineyards are 200 years-old, and they have survived because they have always made such good wine – the owners over history have never pulled them out because the grapes were excellent,” Rodriguez told db in London on 14 May, stressing that the vines are old because the wines they yield are good, and not the other way round.
Although long prized for their quality, these vineyards are now disappearing due to a distortion of free-market forces that are encouraging farmers to move to renewable energy production at the expense of longstanding agricultural practices in Toro.
And the scale of the vineyard losses are significant, according to Rodriguez.
The total area of vineyards in DO Toro is 5,500 hectares, he said, and, in the past five years alone, 2,000ha around the village of Toro is now devoted to the panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.
The incentive to move away from farming is financial, he explained. “Many of the owners in this remote part of Spain don’t live in the area anymore, and they get more return from the land by renting it for solar panels than they get for agricultural activity.”
And the difference in income is substantial. “The best-case scenario for net profit from selling grapes would be €700 per hectare, but they [the landowners] are being promised €2,000 per hectare for 20 years for the solar panels,” he recorded.
Rodriguez is sympathetic to the growers’ predicament. “Many of the landowners in Toro are old, and this [renting the land to solar farms] is the only opportunity for them to finish their lives with some income,” he said.
