Which are the best Verdejo wines from Rueda? One of the guides that sets out to answer that question is the Rueda Top 100 report written by Beth Willard for Tim Atkin MW, and in its 2026 edition, after tasting 310 wines from 57 wineries, it awards 95 points to Finca Saltamontes 2019, the pre-phylloxera Verdejo from Javier Sanz Viticultor, and scores five more of the winery’s wines between 91 and 93 points.
What is Tim Atkin’s Rueda Top 100 report?
The Rueda Top 100 is an independent report on the wines of the Rueda DO, published on timatkin.com, the website of Master of Wine Tim Atkin, and now in its third edition by Beth Willard, who builds it from a round of tastings and visits across the whole appellation. For the 2026 edition she returned to the region in January, tasted 310 wines from 57 wineries, many of them from back vintages, and visited 31 of those wineries in person, so the result covers both wines that have just reached the market and the evolution of those that have spent several years in bottle. Alongside the tasting notes, the report includes a complete table with the score of every wine and a selection of awards by category, and this year it also names the town of origin of wines that come from one or two defined areas, a way of recognising that Rueda’s soils and sub-zones produce distinct wines. Thanks to that journey through 57 wineries, the report offers an up-to-date reading of what is happening in the appellation today, with notes that make it possible to compare styles, vintages and towns by the same yardstick.
Finca Saltamontes 2019, 95 points for a pre-phylloxera vineyard
The winery’s highest-scoring wine is Finca Saltamontes 2019, which earns 95 points and comes from the Pago de Saltamontes, a 2.27-hectare family vineyard registered in 1863 that survived phylloxera and where Verdejo vines more than 150 years old are still producing today. These are very low-yielding vines that give little fruit but great concentration, and the wine made from them undergoes a long period of ageing on its fine lees before resting for several years in bottle, a patient approach intended to show that Verdejo is also a variety capable of ageing. In her tasting note, Beth Willard highlights the expression of the old vines and a lively acidity, and places its drinking window between 2026 and 2029, which confirms that the 2019 vintage is in an excellent place to open now while still having time ahead of it. This assessment follows the 95 points that the Peñín Guide 2025 awarded to the 2018 vintage of Finca Saltamontes, which means that two consecutive vintages from the same vineyard have now reached that score in two different guides, one Spanish and one British.
Malcorta and Colorado, the recovered varieties score too
Two of the wines on the list come from the work of recovering varieties that the winery has been carrying out in La Seca for years. Malcorta 2024 receives 92 points, and it is made from a historic clone of Verdejo that growers gradually abandoned because its bunches were so hard to cut and its yields so low, and which Javier Sanz Viticultor has brought back after years of study. The report itself pauses on this variety, noting that the winery was preparing a case with three vintages of Malcorta, 2019, 2020 and 2021, so that consumers could see what time in bottle brings, and that case is now the Malcorta Vertical three-bottle pack, reserved for members of the JS club. Colorado Cenicienta 2024, meanwhile, scores 93 points in the red wine section, a particularly meaningful result because Cenicienta is a red grape found exclusively in the winery’s own vineyards, located among old vines and recovered through selection and propagation, and it is the grape behind Colorado, a red produced in a limited run of just over 1,000 bottles.
Verdejo, Sauvignon Blanc and Bruñal rosé, the everyday wines
The report does not stop at the most limited wines, since it also scores the whites and the rosé that form the core of the range. Javier Sanz Verdejo 2025 earns 91 points, a Verdejo from the family’s Villa Narcisa estate in La Seca, made from vines over 40 years old and aged for three months on its own lees, while Javier Sanz Sauvignon Blanc 2025, trellised in the Paraje del Camino Real on stony soils, reaches 92 points. They are joined by Paraje La Encina Rosado 2024, with 91 points, a rosé made by bleeding the tank from Bruñal, a minority red grape originally from the Arribes del Duero that the winery has recovered in the soils and climate of La Seca. Seeing the house’s most accessible wines score above 90 points shows that the care given to the vineyard is not kept for a handful of bottles but reaches the ones opened at an ordinary meal as well.
What these scores say about the vineyards of La Seca
Beyond the numbers, the six scores in the Rueda Top 100 2026 reflect something the Sanz family has defended for five generations, with records going back to 1863, which is that the quality of a wine is decided above all in the vineyard. The winery farms more than 120 hectares of its own vines around La Seca, on poor, stony soils with rounded pebbles and at an altitude of between 700 and 800 metres, in a continental climate of sharp temperature swings that helps the grapes keep their acidity, and in that landscape century-old vines grow alongside an experimental vineyard where local and outside varieties are studied. Over time, that work has made it possible to rescue almost forgotten grapes such as Malcorta and Cenicienta and to show the ageing potential of Verdejo with wines such as Finca Saltamontes, which is why the winery reads these scores as confirmation of the path it has chosen, that of a territory interpreted through tradition and research. Anyone who wants to see that origin up close can explore the winery’s vineyards or read the chronicle of the 2026 harvest in La Seca.
