Lagar de Cervera

Lagar de Cervera is the Rias Baixas estate of La Rioja Alta, acquired in 1988 when the Haro house looked beyond its home region for the first time.

Rias Baixas takes its name from the drowned river valleys of the Galician coast, and it is a green, wet, Atlantic place quite unlike most of Spain: rainfall exceeds 1,500 millimetres a year and the challenge is fungal disease rather than drought. Albarino is trained high on granite posts and wires, in pergolas called parras that lift the fruit above the damp ground and let air move through the canopy.

The grape gives stone fruit and citrus over a saline, almost salty finish, and it was made for the shellfish this coast produces in extraordinary quantity. The estate sits at O Rosal, one of the appellation's five sub-zones, close to the Portuguese border.