Antonio Sarrión is the oenologist at Bodega Mustiguillo, located in the Valencia vicinity of Utiel. His star allies are the terroir, Finca El Terrerazo, and the Bobal grape. With their help he has won countless awards and gained acknowledgment for his wines as some of the best representatives of this region’s native variety in the world. A fact confirmed by the bodega’s export figures, which in the early years accounted for around 80 percent of total production and are now stable at 50 percent.

Antonio Sarrión’s story is not that of a run-of-the-mill oenologist. His family has owned wine estates for many years, although traditionally they sold the grapes rather than making wine themselves. However, Sarrión’s formal education was targeted towards business studies and at the tender age of 26 he became managing director of a company making crockery for the hospitality sector. He later signed up as director for a road construction firm in the Levante region, where his family had interests, a position he held for a period of five years, during which he combined the last three years with his Oenology and Viticulture studies in Requena.

“My brother finished his studies in 1997 and that’s when we started to talk, to study and to design a project to build a bodega on our own estate, and I began to devote my time to making wine, but wine with quality. Many people start this kind of enterprise with the backing of an oenologist but I decided to become one myself, I knew the estate well and I invested five years in my education”, Sarrión stated emphasising his point, “before, I used to go to work dressed in a suit and my salary was higher, but now I can say that, although I earn less, I’m happier wearing jeans”.

And that is how Bodega Mustiguillo came into being, located in the municipality of Las Cuevas de Utiel, where Sarrión made his first wine in 1999. “It was a small vintage of hardly 25 barrels made from Tempranillo, Cabernet and Bobal, but it was the latter, the region’s native variety, which caught our attention more than the others due to its personality. That vintage never got on to the market, but it served to make us aware of what would be our real challenge: the Bobal grape”.

Consequently, it was the 2000 vintage that became his debut on the market with two labels: ‘Quincha Corral’ and ‘Finca Terrerazo’, to which ‘Mestizaje’ was added in 2002. With these wines under his belt he travelled to Priorato to contract the services of the Martinet family, who showed interest in the wines and teamed up with Sarrión during 2001 and 2002. During this period the budding vine-grower also took the opportunity to travel to Chile and Argentina, witness a double harvest and acquire more experience. He was accompanied in this travels by Pepe Mendoza of Bodegas Enrique Mendoza.

“The beginnings were very hard. We were up against a vineyard that needed re-engineering, with very old vines, more or less abandoned, and with young root-stock designed to obtain quantity, not quality”, Antonio Sarrión stated in reference to Finca El Terrerazo. The estate covers 90 hectares of vineyard at an altitude of 800 to 900 metres, orientated towards the south and planted predominately with the Bobal variety, although other varieties are also grown such as Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah and Garnacha Tintorera. The stock digs its roots deep into soils covered by a poor and demanding chalk crust with sandy-loam texture at the foot of the sierra, which creates very special conditions for vine cultivation. With warm Mediterranean days and cold continental nights, the grapes are subject to a slow ripening process.