La Rioja Alta

Founded in 1890 in the old railway quarter of Haro by five families, among them the Aranas, the Ardanzas and the Alberdis whose names are still on the labels. La Rioja Alta remains one of the great traditional houses of the region.

Haro's Barrio de la Estación is a remarkable place: half a dozen of Rioja's most historic bodegas sit within a few hundred metres of one another, built there in the 1890s to be beside the railway that carried wine to Bordeaux after phylloxera destroyed the French vineyards. That crisis is why Rioja modernised when it did, and French merchants brought barrel-ageing with them.

The house style is built on long cask ageing and on releasing wines only when they are judged ready, which can mean a decade or more after the harvest. Barrels are racked by hand and by gravity, and the cooperage is done in-house. The numbered wines, 904 and 890, take their names from the years the estate acquired other bodegas, and are made only in exceptional vintages.