Bideona Mayela Rioja Alavesa 2025
£11.75
The wine
Pure and intense aromas of dark cherry and blackberry layered with a hint of violet and clove. The concentrated fruit is beautifully balanced by a fresh palate with chiselled, chalky tannins and a long, mineral finish.
Mayela is the youngest of the range, made with minimal extraction and barely any oak so the fruit and the site show plainly. Telmo Rodríguez and Pablo Eguzkiza deliberately avoid Rioja's Crianza and Reserva labels throughout, on the grounds that they describe time in barrel rather than place.
The producer
Bideona
View all Bideona winesBideona is the Rioja Alavesa project of Telmo Rodriguez and Pablo Eguzkiza, two figures who have spent thirty years arguing that Spain's great vineyards deserve to be treated as places rather than as brands.
The name is Basque, and the whole project is built on village and single-plot bottlings rather than on Rioja's traditional ageing classifications. That is a deliberate rejection of the Crianza and Reserva system, which describes how long a wine spent in oak but says nothing about where it came from. Here the labels name the village instead: Laguardia, Villabuena, Samaniego, Leza.
Rioja Alavesa is the coolest and highest of the three sub-regions, sitting in the lee of the Sierra de Cantabria on chalky clay, and it has the finest raw material in Rioja. The wines are made with minimal extraction and restrained oak, so what shows is the site. It is among the clearest expressions of the new thinking in the region.






