Rioja is famous for its red wines. Yesterday the tinto of Rioja, mixed with sparkling cava wine, flowed through the streets of Calahorra as the 20,000 locals celebrated a windfall of €140 million as their share of the first prize in Spain's bumper Christmas lottery.
Felix Herce, mayor of the fortunate Riojan town, admitted he was one of the few without a share in the winning ticket, but he was celebrating nevertheless.
"A windfall of €140 million is incredible for the town. The annual budget for Calahorra is only €3,000," he said.
Another €140 million landed in Alcantarilla, Murcia, at the other end of the country where most people had a share in the winning ticket sold to them by the local baker.
One lucky prizewinner was Hector Aguirre, an Ecuadoran migrant worker, who won €200,000 after he was persuaded to buy a ticket only minutes before the offices closed on Saturday night. "Now we will be able to bring our daughters over to join us and perhaps buy ourselves a small flat," he said.
There is another belief that a prize falls to a place which has suffered tragedy or misfortune in the previous year, and tickets were in great demand in Galicia, an area still reeling from the devastation of the oil spill from the tanker Prestige which sank last month.
No one regretted it yesterday when the tiny wooden ball bearing the number 31,203, the third prize of €19 million, landed in A Coruna, the Galician port suffering the most from the spill.
El Gordo, the Fat One, one of the world's oldest national lotteries, marks the start of Spanish Christmas celebrations.
Millions were glued to television and radio sets from early morning listening to the children from the San Ildefonso School singing out the winning numbers in a traditional chant monotonous to all except the lucky prizewinners.
It was perhaps a sign of the times that many of the children's names were distinctly non-Spanish, signifying their origins in Latin America or north Africa. Selene and Laydee, from Argentina, sang out the winning number, while Said and Mustafa drew out the wooden balls bearing other lucky numbers.
Although there is a national lottery every week, the Christmas Gordo is the largest and most popular. It has continued almost without a break since 1812, and there are few people who didn't have a share or small "participation" in yesterday's draw.
Each of the 66,000 tickets, costing €200, is divided into decimos (tenths), and many of those into smaller participations,given as gifts to loyal clients in shops and businesses. It was estimated that everyone in the country had invested an average of €75 in the draw.
There are dozens of superstitions connected with the lottery draw.
Almost everyone - except this writer - knows that tickets ending in 5 have come up most often, while 25, 09 or 78 have never come up. Now I know why I am sitting at my desk and not on a sunny beach.
Some believe they will be lucky if they place half an onion and a drop of tomato ketchup on the ticket, or light a candle tied with a blue ribbon and a bunch of parsley alongside their ticket.