Bodegas Ponce

Whole bunches before the vats

The bunches are chilled for 24 hours to 8°C before Juan Antonio Ponce begins the cellar work as winemaker at Bodegas Ponce in Villanueva De La Jara. He founded the estate in 2005, returning to his home ground in Manchuela with Bobal at the center of the practice. The work is family-run rather than institutional; Ponce relies on his father for advice in the vineyards and the cellar, a lineage kept close to the fruit rather than turned into display. His own training in Requena gave him the technical frame, but the discipline here comes from the old plots around Villanueva de la Jara, where Bobal had long been treated as a difficult grape and Ponce chose to ask more of it.

Juan Antonio Ponce has made that question the house method: how to keep Bobal fresh, fine-boned, and transparent to site without polishing away its edge. The wines most closely tied to his name, Clos Lojen Bobal, La Casilla, Albilla Manchuela 2023, and Ponce Blanco 2025, sit inside that same argument. His own sentence carries the useful humility of the place: “I think every vintage has a mistake. Otherwise, we wouldn't be human.”

Old Bobal, cooled and foot-trodden

The estate works around 70 hectares, mostly old vines, with certified organic parcels and biodynamic-leaning viticulture. The vineyard sits on the Meseta plateau in La Manchuela, at roughly 600–700 m, with clay-limestone and mixed soils shaping the fruit before it reaches the cellar. The varieties stay local: Bobal first, then Monastrell, Grenache, Moravia Agria, and Albilla de Manchuela.

In the winery, Ponce uses whole bunches and foot-treads the grapes before fermentation. The vats are small wooden ones, from 1,500 to 4,000 kg, and fermentation starts spontaneously with native yeasts. Aging takes place for 7 months in French oak that has already seen use, including 1,500-litre foudres and 300-litre barrels. The point is not extraction for its own sake. Older wood gives the wine room to carry fruit, stem, soil, and season without the cellar speaking over the vineyard.

A quiet cellar on the plateau

The place itself keeps the scale of a working family winery. The emphasis is on vineyards and cellar work, not visitor theatre. Around the estate, the plateau opens into old Bobal parcels, dry-farmed and spare, with the kind of air that makes altitude felt in the glass. Inside, the cellar has the hush of wood, fermenting fruit, and repeated decisions made by hand.

That restraint is part of the atmosphere. Bodegas Ponce is often discussed as a reference point for low-intervention Bobal in Manchuela, but the room does not need to announce that role. It shows in the sequence: chilled grapes, whole clusters, wooden vats, native yeasts, older French oak, unfined and unfiltered bottling. The house has one current award, and Clos Lojen Bobal moves from these old vines into the glass.