Patience

Same producer as Four Moons. Bodegas Pérez Arquero — the organic-certified estate beside the Tembleque railway station, with its single Manchega herd and the cheese made under master cheesemaker Carlos Molina — produces Patience as its longer-aged DOP expression: curado, held six to twelve months in cellar. The longer cellar time changes the cheese. The buttery lactic register of the semicurado deepens; the raw-milk character intensifies and elongates; flavours of walnut, dried fruit and a hint of chocolate emerge. The texture firms — drier, more crumbly — with the early stages of the crystalline structure that mark a properly aged Manchego. The aftertaste is more pronounced, more intense, more persistent than in the semicurado, but the cheese still retains a buttery quality within its curing window. The Pérez Arquero curado has been recognised by the Cofradía del Queso Manchego, named Best Cured Cheese of Castilla-La Mancha in 2019, and earned a Bronze Medal at the World Cheese Awards 2023–24.