From Ribera to Zamora and La Mancha,
Decade after decade Alejandro Fernández has built his small wine empire

Everything began in Pesquera de Duero during the 1970s. The 1980s led to the founding of Condado de Haza, a winery surrounded by a 200-hectare vineyard. Dehesa de la Granja, located in Vadillo de la Guareña in the south of the province of Zamora was set up in the 1990s. Finally, La Mancha was conquered by the creation of the El Vínculo winery in the town of Campo de Criptana in the province of Ciudad Real.
Alejandro “the Great” stopped selling agriculture machinery and dedicated himself to making wine and selling it around the world. Due to his own efforts, Alejandro Fernández is surely the most popular character in the Spanish wine industry.
His is probably the best-known face in the Spanish wine world. Although no qualifications adorn his calling card, he truly deserves his place in Spain’s wine aristocracy. His name is Alejandro Fernández. He is of pure Castilian blood, sturdy, very large and as hard as an oak tree. He has as much desire as Alexander the Great —the Macedonian monarch who had to content himself with only dominating half the known world— to conquer the world. Alejandro Fernández has gone that little bit further. At seventy years of age, he confesses that he has taken his wines to all the civilized countries that buy wine. These include more than a hundred countries. In addition, there is always a Pesquera wine in any of the states that make up the United States of America.
Nevertheless, the beginnings were not at all easy. They could not be in 1972, when Alejandro decided to get into the world of wine. Spain was then going through an unstable political situation and the 1973 oil crisis was just about to break out. Alejandro was aware of Spain’s political situation and that the Spanish countryside was going through a difficult period. He, however, did not have the faintest idea about the latter.

From Ribera to Zamora and La Mancha
Alejandro Fernández has been consolidating his small winemaking empire decade by decade. Everything began in Pesquera de Duero during the 1970s. The 1980s led to the founding of Condado de Haza, a winery surrounded by a 200-hectare vineyard. Dehesa de la Granja, located in Vadillo de la Guareña in the south of the province of Zamora was set up in the 1990s. Finally, La Mancha was conquered by the creation of the El Vínculo winery in the town of Campo de Criptana in the province of Ciudad Real.

But Alejandro Fernández would not let himself be put off by anything. He wanted to change jobs and he needed to do it. He stopped selling the agricultural machinery he himself designed, like “the first beetroot harvesters seen in Spain” as he recalls, and got down to making and then selling wine, which was far more difficult. He was 40 years old then and left behind a profession and changed it for a vocation from one day to the next. “Pesquera was founded because I liked wine very much and it was my hobby when I was younger”. He continues rather quickly but fluidly, “I had always thought I would plant vines and set up a winery when I had the means to do so”.
At the time, farmers uprooted vines to plant beetroot (subsidised). Ribera de Duero was nothing more than Vega Sicilia, Protos and a few other brands. The town’s inhabitants thought Alejandro was mad, an upstart who had money to spare. But Alejandro had been a cook (or better said, a carpenter) before becoming a monk and, above all else, a pioneer. He admits that he has lived twenty years ahead of everyone else and that if he failed in something, such as in some agricultural machinery, it was because the did things that were far too modern or advanced for his time. Nothing was going to stop this man who, until the age of 17, was ploughing with mules, helping his parents prune vines and “all those tasks…OK, what it means to be a small farmer in a small town”.

Then the first Pesquera red wine saw the light in 1975. Almost immediately, Alejandro Fernández’s first wine brought about a revolution in the Spanish wine scene and had a great repercussion around the world. What then was the key to Pesquera red wine’s success?
“Firstly, its quality”, says its maker. “I made a wine like my parents and grandparents did. It was a full-bodied wine with a lot of extracts. But of course, mine is better made than theirs was. In those days, wine was made to be drunk at home. Any wine left over, if a tub was left over, was given to the mule drivers who sold it around the towns during the summer. I wanted to make a wine like that. However, when I started to sell it, people would say that it was too full-bodied, that it was rough, or so they said. But I decided to carry on because I remember that the people who came from Vinoselección would tell me, “This wine is very astringent, we don’t like it”. And I would tell them, “Well, I have wine to give to a single customer and it turns out that I have three. In other words, two are left over. It’s that simple.”

Grupo Pesquera’s Figures
The four wineries that comprise Alejandro Fernandez’s “Grupo Pesquera” produce 1,800,000 bottles every year. Fifty percent of these are produced at Pesquera; 400,000 at Condado de Haza; 300,000 in Zamora and the rest at the El Vínculo winery. Together the wineries in Ribera and Dehesa de la Granja have 670 hectares of vineyards, all of them with Tempranillo vines. The Group has a total of 16,000 barrels, all of them of American oak. Nine brands of wine are currently being marketed and 40% of total production is exported mainly to the United States, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Japan and Poland. Eva, Alejandro’s younger daughter, will be in charge of carrying on the winemaking tradition.

The truth is that the success of Alejandro Fernández’s wine is due to his perseverance, peculiar marketing techniques (the never failing word-of-mouth technique) and his tireless travels that have taken him to over a hundred countries. As he says, these include all the civilized countries in the world that buy wine. The vision of Alejandro Fernández carrying a case or some bottles of Pesquera in his arms turns out to be true. “Sure, of course it is”, he affirms. “I remember a time with Jesús Anadón, the Vega Sicilia enologist, who was a great person as well as a great character. He liked me very much, and one day we bumped into each other at the airport. My wife, Esperanza, was carrying a case and I was carrying another. He said “Alejandro, Alejandro when are you going to stop carrying around wine?” And I responded, “When I have as much money as you do”. And I’m still like that”, he added. I believe that it does not mean that Alejandro Fernández has or does not have much or little money, or that things are going well or bad for him. What it does mean, among other things, is that Alejandro is a person who cannot sit still. As he himself admits, sitting around is something he just cannot do. Among the other anecdotes and curiosities of his already extensive professional life we arrived at one of crowning moments of his success when Robert Parker, the great wine guru, discovered Pesquera in 1982. He tells the story like this: “Well, the fact of the matter is that Robert Parker is a person who has done a lot for wine. People believe him and when he tried Pesquera 1982 he was tired of trying Rioja wines and didn’t want to try any more Spanish wines. He said they were claret wines, and he wasn’t wrong, because they were very open wines. One day he tried my wine almost by chance because he arrived home late one day and didn’t have any wine left to dine with, but he had a bottle of my wine. And so he said to himself, “Let’s open this Spanish wine and see what happens”. He uncorked that Spanish wine and when he poured it into the glass he said, “Wow, what’s this? This is something else!” He tried it and loved it. As we all know, it didn’t totally convince him, or it seemed strange to him the wine could be so good, so he tasted it again the next day. It was even better that day. He then wrote these words for the magazine he worked for: “You can buy a Chateau Petrus in a wine shop and it can cost you $290 or $300 (in those days), and you can buy a Spanish wine with the same characteristics for only $12.” And he called it Spain’s Chateau Petrus. Yes to Pesquera 1982”. Very fine wines mean little to Alejandro Fernández, “because wine is wine and that’s it”. He is a little more prudent concerning the excessive prices some Spanish wines fetch and thinks that people can do as they please in their own house and winery “and do what they think fit, for me, however, those are showcase wines”. He also believes that wine is never subject to fashion, and that fashion can be for “very fine wines” which are made to obtain a lot points. However, he maintains it is better to make 100,000 bottles of wine and get Parker to give it 90 points than only make 5,000 bottles and get 100 points. Furthermore, Robert Parker believes that other different wines of the same
category could be made in places like Ribera. This can be done in Vadillo de la Guareña in Zamora, for instance, where there are some very impressive Tempranillo grapes known in the area as Tinta de Toro”.

Rumour has it in Zamora that Dehesa la Granja, commonly known as “La Granja" in the area, was almost a gift because it only cost 300 million pesetas. Its total surface area amounts to 800 hectares, almost all of it irrigated, 250 hectares of which are vineyards. The rest is dedicated to growing alfalfa and corn, ideal fodder for the 300 cows and 2,000 sheep that produce very good meat and milk for the Zamora cheeses Alejandro wants to make. The property also has horses and once had bulls (including a trial bullring). The bulls were sacrificed when the property was purchased.
Dehesa la Granja’s real treasure, however, is to be found underground. It is a cellar that was excavated by 125 men with picks between 1750 and 1767. It amounts of 3,000 square meters of galleries and corridors and is where this winery’s wine is stored for two years in American oak barrels. The wine is sold as table wine although it is made on the very borders of the Toro Appellation. In fact, 10 hectares of the property are actually inside the Appellation’s limits.

On the other hand, the winery located in Campo de Criptana in La Mancha, which everyone knows as El Vínculo (the wine’s brand), has a different story. “At El Vínculo I don’t have vineyards because that area has a sea of wine”, says Alejandro Fernández. “What I do there is buy the grapes and we harvest them ourselves. We don’t do it in September like the La Mancha wine growers do, but around the 12th or 13th August because one has to harvest the grapes when they are at the height of their youth, when they are lively and fresh. It’s when they give flavour”. That is how Alejandro Fernández is. Although his daughter is ready to carry on with the Pesquera saga, he admits that he will never stop making wines.