Its name is recognisable the world over – a byword for its best-known export – but La Rioja, a swathe of hills in northern Spain, is more than just a grape-growing region, it is a land steeped in history; with gastronomy and viniculture as rich as the wines that make it famous. Harvest time is a wonderful season to visit, when the fields are ablaze with a hundred shades of reds, browns and greens and the place really comes alive.
The birthplace of the Spanish language and along the route of the Camino de Santiago, La Rioja is a region of religious, economic and historic importance. But it is its red, rocky soil that defines it and as soon as you arrive, you’re made aware of the strong ties its people have with the land.
Everywhere you look, the food, wine and the people are intertwined; from the livestock reared high on the hills, leading down to the olive and almond trees, then the numerous vineyards and finally the vegetables and cereals covering the plains. It’s unashamedly rustic – and that’s a huge part of its charm.
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Logroño, the capital of the region, is home to more than half of La Rioja’s meagre population of just over 320,000. On the Plaza del Mercado, one of the city’s beautiful squares, locals go about their business while tourists relax in outdoor cafes and take photos in front of the 16th century Santa María de la Redonda Cathedral. Logroño’s ancient centre, which dates back to Roman times, is a mass of tiny winding streets.
The Rio Ebro runs through the city’s heart, lined by a beautifully maintained riverside path. Starting in the northwest at the Puente de Sagasta and running east past the Universidad de Rioja, it winds through urban parks, playgrounds and bike tracks, with locals out for their morning run.
If the river gives the city life, then food and wine are what course through its veins, especially along Calle Laurel, where locals claim there are more than 80 tapas and pintxos bars shoulder-to-shoulder on this pedestrianised strip. Here, you can pop into a bar, have a glass of beer or wine (your choice is simple; red or white) and try some local tapas delicacies, including sardines with fiery pimientos, little potato croquettas flavoured with fish or vegetables; tiny rounds of local cheese with honey and walnuts; cured meats and olives; chunks of chorizo served with runny egg or slivers of steak on chewy bread. Served in bite-size pieces, you try one or two morsels – ask for the house speciality – and then move on to the next bar.
Some of the older establishments serve only one thing. My favourite was Bar Soriano, whose singular dish is a stack of large fried mushrooms drowning in garlic butter and skewered onto a piece of bread with one tiny shrimp floating in the top mushroom. A little taste of heaven.
Using Logroño as a base to discover the area, you'll need a car to get around to the villages and wineries (known locally as bodegas). However, if you plan on doing some wine tasting – and why else would you be here – it's a good idea to let someone drive. We toured with Rioja Trek, with a local guide who knew lots about the history of the area and the best places to eat and drink.
An excellent way to start your visit to La Rioja, and to give you a real understanding of the region, is with a trip to the Vivanco Dynasty Wine Culture Museum in Briones. This enormous museum was opened in 2004 by Pedro Vivanco, beside his family’s vineyard. It explains the importance of wine to La Rioja and looks at all elements of the culture surrounding wine production – from its discovery some 10,000 years ago, to the role it has played in civilisations all over the world ever since.
A somewhat overwhelming array of exhibits manage to remain interesting – although there’s limited English translations. You can learn about winemaking, flavours, how barrels and corks are made. There’s a collection of wine-related artefacts – including more than 4,000 corkscrews – and art from Roman times right up to Disney drawings. Outside, in Bacchus’s Garden more than 200 vine varieties are grown; most are reaching ripeness at this time of year.
Just north of Briones, perched on top of a hill, lies the tiny medieval village of San Vincente de la Sonsierra. A narrow road winds its way up to the chapel of Vera Cruz at the peak. The light up here is dramatic, especially in autumn, with dark skies and hundreds of harvest colours of La Rioja Alto rolling out beneath you.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this tiny hamlet though, is Los Picaos, a penitential procession undertaken by the Santa Vera Cruz fraternity (open only to local men of "good standing with the Catholic Church"). Hooded penitents, covered head to toe in white gowns, make their way to the top of the hill. With only holes for their eyes and a square of exposed flesh on their back, they whip themselves in an act of religious fervour, self-flagellating until their backs are streaked with blood. The main event happens at Easter, but you can catch a smaller procession during autumn Holy Cross celebrations – on September 15th this year (We happily settled for photos of the event outside the chapel).
Back on the wine trail, the main attraction is, of course, the hundreds of vineyards and bodegas, from family-run smallholdings to enormous industrial plants.
Some of the more interesting ones we visited include the architecturally impressive Bodega Darien on the outskirts of Logroño, a striking building designed to mimic the rocky ground on which it is built, with a strong emphasis on the tourist experience.
Here, you learn all about the bodega’s wine philosophy, the process from vine to grape to bottle, including the all-important breakdown of the four varieties – Tempranillo, Garnacha, Mazuelo and Graciano – that go into Riojan reds. There are many fine whites, rosés and Cavas produced in La Rioja, but red is king, making up about 85 per cent of overall production.
You also learn about the strictly monitored aging and classification process of Riojan wines (see panel, right). Tastings are given in a laboratory-like classroom and you can view the enormous steel vats, aging casks and cellars that process some 500,000 bottles a year.
For a more traditional bodega experience, Bodegas David Moreno is a family-run operation with beautiful cellars, including its Great Cellar that houses a private tasting table, locked behind ornate gothic gates – very like a scene from a Tim Burton movie.
Above ground in the vineyards, you can help test grapes for sugar content, which determines when they’re ready for harvesting. It’s an informative, enlightening process, one that kids will find great fun as you get to crush the grapes and take the measurements on a refractometer (which looks like a mini-telescope).
As in most of the bodegas, you can try out the wines with foods that compliment them. Here we began our tastings up on the hillside in a chozo, a traditional beehive-shaped stone hut used during harvesting. We tried some of the lighter white wines, including a 2011 David Moreno Blanco, with local olive oil and cheese. Back in the bodega, we had patatas a la riojana, a local speciality potato stew with chorizo and dried red Nora peppers. For this, we moved to the reds, including the excellent 2007 David Moreno Family Selection crianza.
Another good stop along the way was Bodegas Bilbaínas in Haro, home to Viña Zaco, Viña Pomal and La Vicalanda wines. As well as a tour of the bodega, it offers an excellent tasting lesson, complete with a tough test of your ability to identify different aromas, which became fiercly competitive on our tour (what you you mean I'm supposed to smell cherry?).
If all the food and wine gets a little filling – and believe me, it does – there are plenty of other pursuits to help you work up an appetite before your next meal.
Horse riding through vineyards was a great way to cover lots of rocky ground and get us high up into the hills. Centro Hípico Navarrete is based in the village of Navarette, south of Fuenmayor. It offers group excursions for all levels, and beginners can get their bearings in a fenced sand arena first. Then you can make like Zorro (you’ll have to supply your own mask), weaving your way up the hills through the vineyards. This was great fun, especially when we realised the horses were paying no attention to us whatsoever but responding instead to the whistled commands of our guide. Swashbuckling dreams dashed, it was still a great way to take in an alternative view of the valley.
However, if it’s views you’re after, you really can’t beat a hot air balloon ride at sunrise. Globo Arcoiris picks flight paths depending on the winds and weather, so the route changes constantly, but the view is always impressive. You can go as a couple for a romantic treat – or in our case, a not so romantic group of seven – flying across the vineyards, medieval villages and farms. There’s something magical about pausing in the silence thousands of feet in the air for a glass of celebratory Cava (when in Spain . . .) or reaching out of the basket and plucking walnuts from the tops of trees, if your pilot is up for a bit of fun.
Back on planet earth, we spent our last day exploring the monasteries of Suso and Yuso in San Millán de la Cogolla, a Unesco World Heritage Site. It was here that a monk first translated Latin into Castilian, now acknowledged as the birthplace Spanish. Others have made their mark here too, with quite the collection of medieval graffiti carved into the walls of Suso, which itself is partially hewn out of the mountainside.
Returning to Logroño for our final night’s tapas trail down Calle Laurel, there was only one thing for it: a quick run along that Rio Ebro path to make room for one last taste of La Rioja’s finest.
Rachel Collins travelled as a guest of the Spanish Tourist Board
