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Published: October 18th 2014
Eguren Ugarte grapes
This winery brings its grapes using dump wagons pulled by tractors.Wine! After a night in San Sebastian, now officially my favorite large city in Spain, we headed for the area known as La Rioja. We didn’t make a complete tour and know that we missed some of the prime areas, but had fun choosing and visiting some distinctly different “bodegas”. The northeastern quarter of Spain is home to many treasures, including the Basque people and the wineries (bodegas) of the Rioja region. We expected to arrive well after the harvest, but due to a cooler than normal summer and fall, we landed right in the middle. We again rented a car, this time in San Sebastian, and headed south to the grapes. We scheduled four winery tours based on my internet research, and we guessed right! We visited one very old style bodega, one that was very “industrial”, one that used careful modern techniques, and one that was ultra-modern and what I call “architectural”. We did tastings at each place.
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Lopez de Heredia uses only the oldest of techniques, handling the grapes carefully and using all organic (wood) equipment for barrels and filters. They took us through the caves where they age their wine. We bought two bottles of
Haro Area
There are dozens of vineyards in the area -- maybe hundreds! reserva wine there.
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Eguren Ugarte was the industrial winery. They were proud that they never touched the grapes with their hands and the whole atmosphere seemed cold to us. We tasted, but didn’t buy any wine there. Their tour was probably the best, as the guide spoke very good English and explained the whole process completely.
· The
Ysios bodega is one of those that hired an excellent architect to design the building for the express purpose of creating what they called a “modern” wine. Although it was very modern-looking, they stressed that they hand-picked their grapes, moving them in small boxes, rather than throwing them into the dump-truck sized wagons as some wineries did. They create their wines very carefully and we now have one of their very good wines in my big pack to bring home. Wish me luck.
· Our final visit was to the
Baigorri bodega, the architectural one. It’s another very modern building that was built into the side of a hill so that they can take advantage of gravity and avoid using pumps that might damage the grapes. Our tour let us watch them dump huge loads of grapes into
Haro Puzzle
How did they get that truck through that gate? wood or steel vats for fermentation. That was very cool.
All the tours were great, with guides who really knew their stuff. We did tastings at each winery, but didn’t have meals at any, though they were offered. They ran about 40-50 Euros each (US$ 60+) – not tempting, especially since we enjoy our tapas-oriented budget.
At the end of the last day, we met Tom’s adrenalin needs by spending the night in Pamplona, though without the bulls. It’s another beautiful Spanish city, where we relied on our TomTom to get us through uncountable rotaries (roundabouts for the Brits) to a hotel right on the edge of the old town. Once again, we took a long walk at about 5:00 pm through a totally deserted city, went back to the hotel and walked out at 8:00 pm into streets so crowded that you could barely move. I think we found our best pinxto bar there. The next morning, we took the rental car back to San Sebastian, spend another day walking there, slept and took a SEVEN HOUR train ride back to Madrid. That train ride gets its own blogpost.
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Jerry Summerlin
non-member comment
Great
Great info Sandy, thanks. Have fun.