Both large producers and the cooperatives transform grapes into wine, bottle and sell it, and at the same time hold a lot of power in the so-called Consejo Regulador or governing body which decides the rules Rioja’s growers and wineries have to play by. Rioja has lots of growers – about 14,800 farmers who grow grapes which they then sell on to about 574 actual wineries which transform the grapes into wine, bottle it and sell it. This structure means that growers tend to have supply contracts with the larger producers or are members of the various large cooperatives. For example, if you go to a wine fair, you’ll often find a stand just for wines from the Rioja Alavesa – this is because the Basque government financing the stand is happy to support its native Basque producers, but is not prepared to do the same for Rioja producers from further down the road whose winery might be in La Rioja itself or even Navarra!īut there are other reasons too why Rioja’s wine sector is different to the rest of Spain. Most of it is in the Spanish province of La Rioja, but it also strays into other provinces like Navarra to the north-east flank, the Basque province of Álava to the North – hence Rioja Alavesa - and even a tiny bit of Burgos. That’s partly because in political terms the wine region of Rioja covers quite a broad area. While from a winemaker’s perspective, there are important differences between the three zones, unlike lots of other well-known wine regions, the reasons behind Rioja’s internal divisions have perhaps more to do with politics than geology or soil type. Rioja Alavesa, which is the smallest zone, with more family-run wineries, and covers just over 13,000 hectares.Rioja Oriental, or Eastern Rioja, which until recently was known as Rioja Baja, covering 25,000 hectares.Rioja Alta, the western end to the West of Logroño on the map which covers close to 28,000 hectares and includes the famous winemaking town of Haro.And for those of you that like international comparators, that’s just over double the size of Burgundy and half the size of Bordeaux. In terms of size, Rioja has just over 66,000 hectares of vineyards, which is about 7% of the Spanish total. The Ebro river, one of Spain’s great rivers runs through it from West to East. It runs about 100 km from West to East and 40 km North to South, centred around the city of Logroño – which is the capital of the Spanish region of La Rioja. In 1991 this name was Rioja and Priorat 2001.The wine-producing region - or Denominación de Origen Calificada – of Rioja, is in the north of Spain, about 3 hours north of Madrid and just under a hundred kilometres from Bilbao on the coast. The Denominación de Origen Calificada (DOCa) is reserved for wines that meet specific criteria of quality and consistency. Also, the prices on wine have gone up considerably over the last years in Spain, but you still get a lot for the money in Spain.ĭenominación de Origen (Denomination of Origin, DOCa) is the name of a wine region or a specific place that is used to describe an agricultural product or foodstuff of the origin, similar to the French Appellation, and is the category more widespread in quality wines related to the geographical characteristics, mode of cultivation, varieties strains and processes. Especially in wine regions like Priorat, Montsant, Ribera del Duero and Bierzo, the quality jump has been so high that wines from these regions now compeed with the best wines from France and Italy. During the last decades the country has seen a remarkable rise in the quality of the wines produced in all of these categories. Spain har no less than 68 wine regions in total.
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