More than one year ago, I went to the famous La Rioja in a long weekend trip. This region is famous for its red wine, and it attracts a lot of tourism interested in wine. As you may expect, gastronomy was a key aspect of this trip too, although we tried to incorporate some culture into the picture.
While entering in La Rioja from Madrid, our first stop was Santo Domingo de la Calzada (A), which is part of the Camino de Santiago route, which was hosting some local festivities.
We also visited Calahorra (B), mainly because we stayed there, and we especially enjoyed Logroño (C), and its famous Laurel street. A street plenty of bars, where you can try as many different wines as you can imagine, while enjoying the tasty local food.
We could not leave the wine region without visiting one of the many wineries there, and we chose the most famous one due to its renovated architecture: Marqués de Riscal, by Frank Geary, Guggenheim’s architect, in Laguardia (D). In this visit, we went once again through the wine making process, which is always very interesting, and I always get some new insights. This time, I got to know a couple of tips for controlling the wine quality.
They control the variety of grape, the field where it is grown, and its age; and they also make sure the number of grapes per area is limited too. This winery produces 5 million Rioja bottles a year (4 of them are Reserva), and 60% of them are for the international market (that still leaves an impressive amount of 2 million bottles only in Spain!).
