With the arrival of autumn comes the desire to flee the city for the fresh air of the countryside. For us, that means heading to wine country. We went north out of Valencia to visit Bodega Flors, a small family winery that is a beautiful place to experience the wine region of Castellón.

One rarely hears much about Castellón wines. Part of the autonomous Valencian Community, Castellón is not in one of the three Valencian Denominacións de Origen (Alicante, Utiel-Requena, and Valencia). Instead, it is a Vino de la Tierra, a category lower down on the rung of the ladder of Spanish wine designations.

What I find fascinating about this region is that it has thousand of years of winemaking history but most of the current wineries are new. This is partly due to the Phylloxera outbreak in the mid 1800’s, an insect infestation that decimated vineyards throughout Europe…