Bodega Lanzaga

Bodega Lanzaga is Telmo Rodríguez's Rioja estate, and Telmo Rodríguez is the name to know here. He is one of the most influential figures in modern Spanish wine and he is the reason to pay attention here.

He and Pablo Eguzkiza founded the Compañía de Vinos Telmo Rodríguez in 1994 and spent the following years travelling Spain looking for vineyards everyone else had given up on: old Garnacha in Sada, in remote Navarra, when the fashion was for Cabernet and Merlot; the near-forgotten Juan García in Arribes del Duero; Moscatel in the mountains of the Axarquía above Málaga; ungrafted Tempranillo in Toro; Garnacha surviving above a thousand metres in the Sierra de Gredos. Across the whole company they now work 355 plots, around eighty hectares in total, and forty-three native Spanish varieties.

In 1998 they came back to Rioja. They wanted to make a vino de pueblo, a village wine, and they chose Lanciego, in Rioja Alavesa, for its landscape and its contrasting climate. Bodega Lanzaga today covers fifteen hectares of small parcels around the village. In 1999 they bought an old bodega in the barrio de las bodegas to learn how wine had been made here in the eighteenth century, and the walls still carry the yeasts that ferment their grapes. In 2007 they built a winery at Lanciego out of earth, iron and the staves of their own old barrels. Their stated ambition, in their words, is to make "the best Rioja wine from the 18th century".

That is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is an argument with the way Rioja classifies itself. The familiar Crianza, Reserva and Gran Reserva grades measure how long a wine sat in barrel and bottle and say nothing at all about where the grapes grew. Telmo works the other way round, from the site inwards: village wine first, then individual vineyards. Las Beatas and Tabuérniga in Labastida, and El Velado and La Estrada in Lanciego, are bottled separately. Las Beatas took twenty years of work before the first vintage was released in 2011. Rioja itself has since started moving this way, and since 2018 producers have been able to put a village name on the front label.

LZ is the entry point, Tempranillo with Garnacha and Graciano from plots around Lanciego, made to drink young and fresh. Lanzaga is the village wine proper, from the better fruit, and it is the one that shows what the site can do.

Above those sit the single-vineyard wines, of which Las Beatas is made in tiny quantities and priced to match. At the other end there is Corriente, the deliberately simple everyday bottling.

If sweet vanilla oak and soft, ageing-by-numbers Rioja have put you off the region, start with the LZ. It is a different argument about what Rioja is for.