Montilla named Spanish Wine City 2027, beating Jerez
The Córdoba town that gave amontillado its name will run a year of wine events built around Pedro Ximénez. Jerez, the other bid, plans its own wine year instead.
Montilla, the Córdoba town at the heart of the Montilla-Moriles wine region, will be Spanish Wine City 2027. The board of ACEVIN, the Spanish Association of Wine Cities, chose it at a meeting in Alcázar de San Juan on Wednesday 30 September, ahead of a bid from Jerez.
The title gives the town twelve months, from January to December 2027, to stage a programme of wine, wine tourism and wine culture events, with an opening and a closing gala, according to Cordópolis. The town council says it will now approach institutions, associations and companies to build the calendar. No budget for the year has been published.
Montilla ran under the slogan "Montilla, from the kingdom of Pedro Ximénez to the world". The mayor, Rafael Llamas, described the title as the start of a path rather than an end point, with wine tourism as one of the town's main economic prospects.
The town that lent its name to amontillado finally gets a title of its own.
What Spanish Wine City 2027 brings to Montilla
The year coincides with the opening of a wine museum and visitor centre in El Parador, a historic building in the town. Cordópolis reports that the building work is finished and the exhibition fit-out is under way. The project belongs to a tourism sustainability plan called Amontíllate, funded with more than €2.7 million from the EU's NextGenerationEU programme, according to Montilla Digital. The bid also commits the town to keep pushing for UNESCO intangible heritage status for the know-how around the Pedro Ximénez grape.
ACEVIN created the title in 2023. Cambados, in Galicia, held it first in 2024, and Requena, near Valencia, holds it in 2026. It is skipped in years when a Spanish town is European Wine City, so that two Spanish candidates do not compete.
Amontillado, Pedro Ximénez and Jerez
The word amontillado means "in the style of Montilla", a reminder that the sherry towns of Cádiz borrowed a name from a region that is rarely credited abroad. Montilla-Moriles works almost entirely with Pedro Ximénez, which is used here for dry finos as well as for the dark, sweet wines sold under the grape's name. The Spanish Wine City 2027 title lands as Spanish wine exports fall 7.2% in the 2025-2026 campaign.
Jerez, Spanish Capital of Gastronomy in 2026, is not letting the matter drop. Its mayor, María José García-Pelayo, told La Voz del Sur that the city will carry its gastronomy year into 2027 with a wine promotion programme funded by the Cádiz provincial government. Two Andalusian wine towns, eighty kilometres of motorway short of being neighbours, will spend 2027 selling the same grape story from different ends.
