Bodegas Bhilar

A boutique winery at Elvillar in Rioja Alavesa, run by the husband-and-wife team David Sampedro and Melanie Hickman. They make terroir-driven wines from indigenous grapes, and the farming is as serious as the winemaking.

The land has been worked organically for over twenty years and biodynamically for fifteen of those, and in 2014 horses replaced tractors in the vineyards altogether. Horses compact the soil far less than machinery, which matters on the poor limestone soils of the Alavesa where root depth and soil life do much of the work. The estate is Demeter certified, the international biodynamic standard.

Phinca is the Basque spelling of finca, meaning plot, and the top wines are named for the individual parcels they come from rather than blended to a house style. Rioja Alavesa is the coolest and highest of Rioja's sub-regions, sitting in the lee of the Sierra de Cantabria on chalky clay, and it gives wines of more perfume and finer tannin than the warmer areas further east.