Bodegas Marisol Rubio

The story of Bodegas Marisol Rubio begins not with a winery but with a death, and with the decision of a family to turn their grief into something lasting.

Cipriano Garrido is a fifth-generation farmer from Villanueva de Alcardete, a small town in the province of Toledo where viticulture is as old as the landscape itself. His estate, La Rizosa, sits at 837 metres above sea level on the border between Toledo and Cuenca, on franc-calcareous soils where the rustic terrain is suited to little else beyond vines and olives. For generations the Garrido family, like most growers in this part of Castilla-La Mancha, delivered their harvest to a cooperative. The grapes made someone else's wine.

Cipriano's conviction that the climate and altitude of La Rizosa could support Pedro Ximénez, a variety associated almost exclusively with the sweet fortified wines of Jerez and Montilla-Moriles, led him to plant 2.7 hectares of it. The altitude, the extreme swings between hot days and cold nights, and the limestone-dominant soils all pointed, in his reading of the land, toward something different: a dry, fine, genuinely distinctive white wine in a region where nobody was making one. When those first Pedro Ximénez vines came into fruit, Marisol Rubio, Cipriano's wife and the mother of his children Piedad and Jorge, died. The family decided to vinify that inaugural harvest themselves rather than sell it on. The winery they founded in her name produced just 1,500 bottles in its first vintage, 2019.

The name of the estate's flagship wines, CIPMA, fuses the first letters of the parents' names: Cipriano and Marisol. It is a quiet, private homage encoded into every bottle.

What Bodegas Marisol Rubio has built since that first vintage is something genuinely singular. The winery is the only producer in central Spain making a dry monovarietal Pedro Ximénez. At 837 metres, with the thermal range of the high meseta stripping out any tendency toward overripe heaviness, the Pedro Ximénez produces wines of real freshness, mineral definition, and an ability to age that has surprised even specialists. The wines have been noticed: Son d Sol, CIPMA I and CIPMA II have all scored above 91 points in the Wine Up guide. Son d Sol was awarded a Bronze at the Decanter World Wine Awards 2022. The wines appear on the lists of some of Spain's finest restaurants and have earned coverage from Jancis Robinson, El Español, La Razón and The Cellar Door.

The CIPMA I is fermented with indigenous yeasts in underground concrete tanks and aged six months in 225-litre American oak barrels from Kentucky. It is an intense golden-yellow, aromatic with white stone fruit, flowers, and warm spice. The CIPMA II follows the same hand-picked harvest but takes a different path through the cellar, with eight months in new American oak producing a more complex, structured wine with anise, menthol, and a firm, gastronomic finish. Both are produced in fewer than 3,000 bottles per vintage. Son d Sol, the entry to the range, is fermented entirely in concrete tanks: straw and gold in the glass, with lime peel, orchard blossom, and a long, chalky mineral finish. Son d Luna, launched in late 2025, is the estate's first red: a Tempranillo from 2.73 hectares of La Rizosa, 1,550 bottles, with eight months in oak and a profile of red fruit, chalk, wild herbs and high-altitude freshness.

Briffa Wine Selections is the exclusive importer of Bodegas Marisol Rubio wines in Malta. These are wines from one of Spain's most original small producers, made in tribute to a person and in proof of what a place can do. Browse the range and order online, with delivery across Malta.