Marqués de Cáceres collects Spain's best white wine award
Los Altares 2016, the Cenicero winery's first white Gran Reserva, came through a shortlist drawn from Bacchus 2026 and received its prize at Madrid's Teatro Real.
Marqués de Cáceres has collected the Alimentos de España award for the best white wine of 2026 with Los Altares 2016, a white Gran Reserva from the DOCa Rioja made in Cenicero. The prize, granted by Spain's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, was handed over at the Teatro Real in Madrid on Tuesday 13 October.
Managing director David Losantos received it at a ceremony presided over by agriculture minister Luis Planas, where 28 prizes were given out across food and wine. The win had been official since 10 August, when the resolution appeared in Spain's Official State Gazette. This was the 38th edition of the awards.
How Marqués de Cáceres won the white category
In a region sold abroad on its reds, the ministry's top white prize went to an aged Rioja.
The ministry does not start from a blank page. Its candidates are the five highest-scoring wines in each category at Bacchus 2026, the international competition run by the Unión Española de Catadores, where Los Altares 2016 had already taken a Great Gold. A jury then weighs the Bacchus score at 60% and its own assessment at 40%, looking at commercial effort, innovation, links to local farming and sustainability.
Los Altares is the winery's first white Gran Reserva. It is made from old-vine Viura plus small amounts of other white varieties once interplanted with red vines, hand-picked from low-yielding plots on the higher, poorer parts of the vineyards. It ferments in new French oak, stays in barrel for 10 to 12 months depending on the plot, rests four months in concrete and then ages for a long period in bottle. The technical sheet lists 13.5% alcohol; the winemakers are Fernando Costa, Emilio González and Manuel Iribarnegaray.
Critics had scored it before the ministry did: 92 points from James Suckling and 92 in Tim Atkin's 2026 Rioja report, according to the winery, which presents the wine as an argument for long-lived Rioja whites.
A Rioja white among Spain's 2026 wine winners
The other four wine categories went to Aires de Garbet 2021 from Perelada (DO Empordà, red), Inurrieta Mediodía Rosado 2025 (DO Navarra, rosé), Freixenet's Cuvée DS 2019 (Cava, sparkling) and Osborne's Fino La Honda (Jerez-Xérès-Sherry, fortified). The evening's extraordinary award went to Bodegas Protos of Peñafiel, which turns 100 in 2027.
Founded in Cenicero in 1970, Marqués de Cáceres says it sells in more than 140 countries. The prize arrives in a lean year: Spanish wine exports fell 7.2% in the 2025-2026 campaign, and an aged white gives Rioja a different story to take to those markets.
The next round is already fixed by the rules: the 2027 shortlist will again come from the top five scores in each category at that year's Bacchus, the stage where Los Altares first stood out.
