Verdejo country on the high Castilian meseta, where vineyards have been documented since the repopulation of the land in the eleventh century. The wines of Rueda were drunk at the court of Isabel the Catholic, and for centuries the region's pride was its dorado — a golden wine aged under flor in deep underground cellars, closer in spirit to sherry than to anything modern Rueda sells.
That old style nearly died with the twentieth century. In the 1970s, new cellars — Rioja houses among them — turned instead to the native Verdejo picked cold and fermented fresh, and reinvented the plateau as the source of Spain's crisp everyday white. The icy nights of the meseta, once a hardship, became the whole point.