An organic fino wine which claims to be the first of its kind has been launched by a Spanish winery based in Cordoba. The fino, which is from the Montilla-Moriles denomination of origin (DO), is produced by Bodegas Robles, one of Spain's leading organic wine producers.
With increasing mounts of organic wine sold throughout the world, the creation of organic products based on that wine was the next logical step. With more than 200 hectares of organic vineyards in Andalusia feeding 14 organic wineries, most within the Montilla-Moriles DO, it was only a matter a time before an organic fortified wine was produced.
Bodegas Robles has been a pioneer of organic wine production in Spain, where there are now more than 12,000 hectares of vineyard dedicated to organic grape production. The company has already produced other organic fortified wines - a pale cream and a pedro ximenez, for example - but this is the first time it has created an organic variant of the most popular variety, fino.
Robles told Europa Press that it was becoming increasingly important to be able to offer organic variants of popular products because consumer demand for high quality products which respected the environment was growing.
The company was the first to begin producing organic wine in the Cordoba region in 1999, with 10,000 bottles produced that first year. But the growth in organic wine production there has been almost exponential since then, with some 173,000 bottles produced last year, of which some 5,000 were set aside for creation of the fino.