Zaha Hadid is the only woman, along with 40 male architects, to have won the Pritzker Prize, the world's highest professional award, in 2004. She died of a heart attack in March 2016. She was called the Queen of Curves, for the unusual shapes of the museums of contemporary art, opera houses and other buildings she designed. She also gave this 1877 winery, built of brick, a contemporary touch. And the story of the López de Heredia cellar is also the story of the success of the Rioja region. After phylloxera ravaged French vineyards in the second half of the 19th century, Bordeaux winemakers began to come to the north of Spain for grapes, where there is a lot of sandy soil in which the root-eating louse cannot live, so a large part of the vineyards survived the pandemic.
The French were looking for grapes and must, and the people of Rioja began to build wineries around the train stations. In Haro, in fact, the tracks led right to the cellars to make loading easier. Apart from the decanter at the entrance, the López de Heredia winery still looks the same today as it did 139 years ago. The production area is filled with huge wooden vinifiers, whose age is unknown because the founder, Don Rafael López de Heredia y Landeta, bought them used. The wine matures in 225-liter barrels that are not changed every three or five years like in most modern wineries, but are used for decades. Then the wine from several barrels is blended, or mixed, in a large vinifier and finally left to settle in the bottle for a year or two before being released on the market.
We don't want our wine to have woody aromas, so we let it travel through time with the little air that the old wooden barrels let in. Every few years we repair them in our own cooperage. And we only sell the wines when we consider them ripe enough, never before ten years have passed since the harvest, Mercedes López de Heredia, the head oenologist of the family winery that has four vineyards, told us. The vineyards are Gravonia, Tondonia, Bosconia and Cubillo, and they make a special wine from each. The predominant variety is Tempranillo (80 percent). From the reds, they also have Garnacha (15 percent) and a little bit of Mazula (Carignan) and Graciano. From the whites they have the local Viura, also called Macabeo, and Malvasia del Rioja, one of the dozens varieties with that name that grow throughout the Mediterranean.
You can recognise vineyard in our wines, not the vintage. Until 1991, we didn't even write the year on the label, but then the regulations changed, so now we have to. But the numbers are small, the letters from the vineyard name are much larger. We want customers to always get a similar wine, so we sometimes mix vintages. Only in years that are significant for the family, or when the vintage is exceptionally good, we bottle some of the wine with the vintage designation. And those are aged for seven to 10 years in the cellar and another seven years in the bottle, explains Mercedes.
Even more striking is the blend of old and new at the Protos winery in Peñafiel, the center of the neighboring Ribera del Duero wine region. The old winery is dug into the hill below the castle from which the Spanish watched for an attack by the Moors until the 15th century. The winery moved into the corridors and galleries below the castle around 1950. In the process, they discovered many unknown halls, and now have 2.5 kilometers of corridors filled with barrels in which the wine matures, and in the halls are archives with millions of bottles filled since its founding in 1927.