October 17th: Viña Sastre with Jesús Sastre - Pago de Santa Cruz Vertical Tasting
At Vinonueva | 5145 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL, 33137 | 7:00 pm-8:30 pm
Click HERE to get tickets
Please note that this tasting will be in Spanish.
Last October, we welcomed Sara Sastre to Vinonueva for our first tasting with Viña Sastre. Now, we return to Ribera del Duero with her father, Jesús Sastre, for a very different look at the estate.
Rather than moving across the Sastre portfolio, we will focus on one place: Pago de Santa Cruz, one of the family’s most important single-vineyard wines. Through a vertical tasting, we’ll follow its expression across different vintages, exploring how each year’s conditions, the character of the fruit, decisions in the cellar, and time in bottle shape the wine.
Jesús Sastre himself will guide us through that evolution, giving us the opportunity to understand Pago de Santa Cruz through the perspective of the winemaker behind it.
We had a glimpse of that evolution during our tasting with Sara last year, when we tasted the 2012 and 2015 vintages of Pago de Santa Cruz. Both were fantastic, showing depth and structure while retaining remarkable freshness. We found notes of eucalyptus, dark chocolate and mint, along with an elegance that challenged the idea of mature Ribera del Duero as necessarily heavy, overly tannic, or dominated by oak.
BACKGROUND
The Sastre family’s story in Ribera del Duero stretches back three generations. Jesús’s grandfather, Severiano Sastre, was already making wine in the underground cellars of La Horra in the 1950s and, in 1957, became one of the founders of the local cooperative. The next generation continued that work, and in 1992 Severiano’s son Rafael Sastre, together with his sons Pedro and Jesús, established Bodegas Hermanos Sastre and began producing wine from the family’s own vineyards.
That connection to the vineyard remains at the center of Viña Sastre today. Their farming is deliberately hands-on, with old vines, manual harvesting, and an approach influenced by organic and biodynamic principles. In the cellar, however, Jesús is not opposed to technology or modern winemaking tools. Instead, his philosophy is to understand what each vineyard and vintage gives him and make decisions accordingly.
No single formula dictates how much new oak a wine should see or how it should be raised. As Sara explained to us during our last tasting, those decisions begin with the grapes themselves — the age of the vines, the structure and concentration of the fruit, and the proportion of juice to barrel. Fruit from their oldest vines can have the structure to benefit from new oak, helping to round and refine the tannins. Even if their personal preference might lean toward seasoned barrels, the decision is ultimately about giving each wine what it needs. The objective remains the same: the grape and the fruit should come first, with the cellar's influence supporting rather than obscuring them.
In a way, the family name itself feels fitting: Sastre means “tailor” in Spanish, and there is something very tailored about their approach to winemaking. Rather than applying the same formula to every wine, they respond to the vineyard, the fruit and the vintage in front of them.
This brings us to Pago de Santa Cruz.
Located in La Horra at approximately 840 meters of elevation, Pago de Santa Cruz sits on clay-calcareous soils on slopes above the Duero and Gromejón rivers. Its old, goblet-trained vines average approximately 80 years of age and are planted entirely to Tinta del País, the local name for Tempranillo.
For the Sastre family, Santa Cruz has long been considered an exceptional site. What began with one parcel grew to incorporate neighboring plots, and rather than erasing their history, the family kept the names of the people who had previously worked them. It is a small detail, but one that says a great deal about the Sastre philosophy: these wines are not simply about a place, but about preserving the history of the people who farmed it before them.
Pago de Santa Cruz also lets us look beyond some traditional expectations of Ribera del Duero. Rather than pursuing concentration or oak, Jesús looks for a balance between the natural structure of old-vine Tempranillo and the freshness, acidity, and elegance that allow the wine to evolve.
Check out the lineup for this tasting:
- Ribera del Duero 'Pago de Santa Cruz' Gran Reserva 2009 (Magnum)
- Ribera del Duero 'Pago de Santa Cruz' 2010
- Ribera del Duero 'Pago de Santa Cruz' Gran Reserva 2011
- Ribera del Duero 'Pago de Santa Cruz' Gran Reserva 2012
- Ribera del Duero 'Pago de Santa Cruz' Gran Reserva 2014
- Ribera del Duero 'Pago de Santa Cruz' Gran Reserva 2015
- Viña Sastre Pesus 2018
Photo credits: Viña Sastre