The winery
The removal of the old winery to the next door building, La Casa de Labor, allowed to update the manufacturing facilities and technology to improve quality, keeping the craft production philosophy.
History
The origins of Bodega Tercia de Ulea dates from the xIII th century. After the conquest of Moratalla from the Arab domination by the Saint Santiago Military Order in 1.242 year, the Command was created and among its possessions, stood the country state “La Tercia de Ulea”.
The S. Santiago Order, reserved the country state and farm house of Ulea for the privilege of its Comanders, developing the existing winery and extending the vineyards. In the Moratalla Town Hall Archives, there are a lot of documentary about his “granary tower” the wine production and its hermitage, which testify its important local activity since the XV th century.
In those times, Moratalla had an important wine production and his wines had an important quality reputation, as mentioned by Bernardo de Spinalt (Officer of the Royal Court General Postal ) in XVIII in his book “Atlante Español” in which textually states, Moratalla “produce all the necessary fruits to the vine and taste, specially wine, of such a beauty quality, which is taken for foreigns kingdoms”
After the “filoxera” epidemy in early XIX th century, most of the vineyards of Moratalla were lost and for this reason the majority of the wineries disappeared.
With the death of the last Knight Comander Francisco de Paula in 1.865 year, the Tercia de Ulea was adquired by the Chico de Guzman family who continued with the wine cellar tradition. Today the property and winery is still joined to the same family in the fourth generation.
To improve the winery facilities, in 2004 the winery was moved from its previous place in the main building near to the San Jose Hermitage, to the next door building La Casa de Labor.
The winery
The removal of the old winery to the next door building, La Casa de Labor, allowed to update the manufacturing facilities and technology to improve quality, keeping the craft production philosophy.
The manufacture of the wine is adjusted lot by lot, to extract the most interesting caractheristics of each grape variety and terrace soil. The wine tanks are all of them bellow 10.000 liter capacity. This fact permits to treat each vineyard in a different manner, balancing the different caractheristics in the final coupage. So we get a wide range of flavours in our wines.
Nowadays we manufacture dry and semi-sweet rose wines and red wines of the vintage and oak cask aging.
The winery belongs to the D.O. Bullas (guarranty of origin).
The winery keeps an important relationships with the neighbourhood of the region and agriculture turism. For this reason we have adapted an old barn into a wine space under the name “La Casa de Labor”, where we allow our visitors to taste and buy our wines, whilst they can understand our manufacturing process, amoung the old equipment, watching the current facilities through several glass walls.
