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JR's notes:

I've known Carlos Falcó for more than ten years now, and have visited him at the Casadevacas half a dozen times. His contribution to viticulture in Spain - especially in non-traditional areas - has been considerable and is likely to become even more considerable when his projects in Fermoselle are completed. The wine-laws of Spain are being tested in the first years of the 21st century, and it is Falco who began the test, back in the 1970s. DECANTER magazine asked me to write a profile of the man who has done so much for Spanish wine, and this was published in October, 2000. The DECANTER website is at www.decanter.com

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THE MAVERICK MARQUÉS

Hunter, conservationist, landowner, father, grandfather and Grandee of Spain Carlos Falcó y Fernández de Córdova, Marqués de Griñón, makes an unlikely subversive, but his contribution has changed and is still changing the face of Spanish viniculture. John Radford has been finding out about one Spain's most colourful characters.

Carlos Falcó is quick to point out that he is not a winemaker, but an agronomist and agricultural engineer. He studied in Louvain, Belgium in the 1950s and then moved on to do postgraduate work at Davis in California, where in 1964 he met Dr Maynard Amerine who first fired his enthusiasm for wine.

Wine had, however, played a part in the family's fortunes for a very long time before that. In the fighting which accomplished the reconquest of most of Andalucía in the fourteenth century, a soldier by the name of Ribera distinguished himself particularly and was rewarded by Pedro of Castile (later Pedro I of Portugal) by the grant of 10,000 hectares in the valley of the river Pusa (a tributary of the Tajo/Tejo/Tagus) which featured deer, wild boar and bears.

The Riberas planted olive-trees and vines and settled down to a post-reconquest tranquillity which included intermarriage with the Fernández family from Córdova (Córdoba). Later the family acquired lands in the region of Griñón, (Madrid) and the Señor ('squire') of Valdepusa also became the Señor of Griñón. Another marriage in the seventeenth century brought in the Moncayo family, grandees of Spain, and the Señorío de Griñón was 'promoted' to the status of Marquesado in the 19th century by Queen Isabella II: the Señor became a Marqués.

The first republican government confiscated the Dominio de Valdepusa in 1933, although it was returned by the second republican government in 1935, and Carlos Falcó's grandfather sold half of it to the town of Malpica de Tajo in 1945, at an affordable price subsidised by the Franco government. This ensured that peace was re-established between the Dominio and the local townspeople.

Carlos himself was born in 1937, in Sevilla. The family had been on holiday in the Basque country when the civil war broke out in July, 1936 and they found it impossible to return to Madrid. The Royal Navy obliged with passage to France, and they subsequently sailed to Portugal and re-entered Spain. Carlos Falcó's mother, Hilda Fernández de Córdova spent the rest of the war in the home of the Duque de Alba in Sevilla as her husband went off to fight against the republicans 'for the restoration of the monarchy'.

The young Carlos Falcó spent a lot of time across the border in Portugal where one of his childhood friends was Juan-Carlos, the young grandson of the exiled King of Spain, Alfonso XIII. They played, learned to ride and hunted together and when, very much later, Juan-Carlos became King of Spain, the friendship continued. Indeed, the heir-apparent Prince Felipe and his sister Princess Elena helped to tread the first Syrah vintage at Malpica in the autumn of 1995.

In 1963, at the age of 25, Carlos married the Swiss Janine Girot after his studies in Belgium, and the following day they left for America, arriving in Miami and then spending their honeymoon driving a Maserati across country to San Francisco. In due course they had two children - the eldest son Manuel (Manolo) and daughter, Xandra, both of whom have just presented Carlos with grandchildren. Sadly, the marriage to Janine broke up in 1970.

Carlos Falcó returned to Spain to manage the family estates in 1964, but for ten years he hardly considered wine. He planted tobacco in Extremadura and the family fortunes were heavily involved in fruit-trees and olive-groves. It was while he was importing Granny Smith apple-tree cuttings from France that he first thought of bringing in some vines for the family estate at Valdepusa. He remembered Maynard Amerine's teachings about the success of Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay in California - and the similarity of the climates of California and Toledo - and inquired about importing suitable vines. This was banned by the authorities in France who didn't want anybody else to plant French vines, and by the government in Madrid which didn't want any more foreign varieties to be imported. Falcó solved the problem by smuggling vine-cuttings in along with his Granny Smiths and, given that the Malpica estate is 6 km from the nearest human habitation and 2 km from the nearest road, nobody was any the wiser.

The Malpica vineyard was planned with guidance from Professor Peynaud of Bordeaux University. Carlos Falcó also decided to use, for the first time in Spain, a drip-irrigation system he had seen on a trip to Israel in 1972. The first vines - Cabernet-Sauvignon - were planted in 1974, and the first commercial vintage was produced from the 1982 crop. This coincided with other events in Carlos Falcó's life which threatened to derail the project. In 1980 he met and married the Filipino beauty Isabel Preysler, who had formerly been married to the singer Julio Iglesias. The Spanish gossip columnists had a field day: Carlos was labelled an international jet-setting playboy and was hauled through the pages of ¡Hola! magazine and various scurrilous scandal-sheets on a regular basis. Not that this bothered him or, indeed, Isabella, but he did begin to worry that the new Malpica wines wouldn't be taken seriously by the market and might even be seen as a gimmick. In th e event, any bad publicity in Spain was wiped out by the enthusiastic response given to the wines abroad - particularly in the UK - and the first vintage sold out. In the meantime, Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Tamara, but the marriage broke down in 1985, and she and Carlos were divorced.

In the 1980s, Carlos Falcó diversified, with a Rueda in 1982, Durius - a wine made with grapes from the DOs Toro and Ribera del Duero, and a Rioja. In due course all these would come together in his joint-project with Arco (Bodegas Unidas) which includes Marqués de Monistrol (Cava and Penedès wines) and Berberana and Lagunilla in Rioja, as well as the new winery in Argentina.

Plantings at Malpica continued: Syrah in 1991, Chardonnay and Petit-Verdot (the first in Spain) in 1992, more of both in the late 1990s, and a new clone (117) of Graciano in 2000. There were other changes, too: in 1987 Carlos had met Fátima de la Cierva, a scion of one of Spain's oldest families, the Infantado. His reputation after the previous marriage was still a little 'colourful' for her very traditional family but Carlos persevered, and they were eventually married six years later, in 1993. Eschewing the privileged life of the Spanish aristocracy, Fátima has spent her professional life as a social worker in the nearby town of Talavera de la Reina working with deprived children, and she has also overseen the redevelopment of the old Malpica stable-block into a modern office and computer complex complete with conference and dining facilities, which opened this year (2000).

New projects continue: Argentina began in 1996 and Arco is building a new winery in Arribes del Duero - at Fermoselle in the province of Zamora, which will make the existing red and white Durius wines as well as a new one, Gran Durius. The new vineyard will be mainly Tempranillo, with Cabernet-Sauvignon, Merlot, Malbec, Syrah and the obscure Juan-García - Carlos believes it's a grape with a great future

Carlos Falcó's other major impact has been in the development of wine laws in Spain. The early Malpica wines were simply classified as Vino de Mesa (Table Wine) and weren't permitted to carry the name of a grape or a vintage date. The law was changed to allow wines to classify themselves as 'Vino de Mesa de...' (in this case, '...de Toledo') to allow varieties and vintages to be listed, largely as a result of Carlos' lobbying. In 1998, having seen the massive success of the French Vin de Pays d'Oc (in which minimal regulation had allowed new-wave winemakers to produce some astonishing wines) he recommended to the agricultural department of Castilla-La Mancha (which includes Toledo) that there should be a region-wide Vino de la Tierra classification. This came into law in 1999 as the VdlT de Castilla. Neighbouring Castilla-León was livid at first, but is even now busy setting up its own VdlT de Castilla-León, and the new Durius venture will come under this class ification.

And there's home life on the family estate, as well: Carlos and Fátima have two children - a son Duarte, born in 1994 and a daughter Aldara born in 1997. Carlos, predictably for a country gentleman, enjoys hunting and shooting but he also has a love of music, especially Mozart and the Baroque, and he goes to the festivals when he can, and both he and Fátima love to travel, which is just as well, given the extending compass of the Griñón empire. They seem a very happy family indeed.

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