Visit and Tasting at Bodegas Faelo, a Family Wine of the Camp d'Elx in Matola

Bodegas Faelo is a country house in Matola, a hamlet of the Camp d'Elx, where the same family has made wine for more than a hundred years. It is now on the fourth generation. The visit takes you through the grandfather's cellar, the vineyard and the barrel room, and ends at the table with four or five of the house's wines. It is a short outing in the Elche countryside, trading palms for vines.

Grandfather Faelo's house

Grandfather Rafael, "Faelo", began treading grapes in 1930 in the afollaor, the house's winepress. For seventy years the wine was sold in bulk; it was not bottled at the Casa-Bodega until 2000. Today the winery works its own land with biodynamic viticulture, ferments only with native yeasts in 4,000-litre temperature-controlled steel tanks, and puts only the best wine through new barrels. Each vintage comes out with numbered, limited bottles, as Camp d'Elx wines within the Alicante D.O.P.

Two visits, two tables

The tasting visit lasts about an hour and a half and costs €20: it covers the grandfather's cellar, the pressing house, the vineyard, the fermentation room and the barrel room, and ends with four wines, white, rosé, red and sweet, and a plate of nibbles. The tapas and wine gastronomic experience, of about two hours, costs €28 and goes up to five wines, from the white to the crianza and the sweet, with two canapés, a hot meat pie and fig, date and apricot bread. If you go with children, there is a €12 children's menu with soft drinks, cured meats, cheese, mini pizza and a wafer. There are gluten-free, lactose-free and vegetarian menus: say so when you book.

Booking and getting there

Visits are Monday to Saturday, by reservation, on the form on its website or on 655 856 898, for groups of up to 50 people. The shop is open Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 18:00 and Saturday from 10:00 to 15:00. On Sunday it is closed. The winery is on camino de los Coves, partida de Matola, in the countryside southwest of the city; go by car and bring a driver who is not drinking. In the first half of September it holds the Festa de la Verema, with grape treading, on a date it announces on its website.

Very close, the Puçol School Museum shows what life was like in this same countryside a hundred years ago.