Producer Rioja, Spain
Conde Valdemar
Conde Valdemar is the best-known label of Bodegas Valdemar, the Martínez Bujanda family's winery in Oyón, a small town in Álava on the northern edge of Rioja. The family have been making wine here since 1889, when the first generation worked out of a small stone cellar in the village. They are on the fifth generation now, and the business is still theirs: Ana and Jesús Martínez Bujanda run it today, having taken it on from their father Jesús, who built the modern Bodegas Valdemar with his own father in the 1980s. That continuity is getting rarer among Rioja names of this size.
Winery at Oyón, Rioja.
What separates Valdemar from the many other competent family bodegas in Rioja is a genuine appetite for going first. In 1982 they were among the first to take the Graciano grape seriously again, at a point when it was disappearing from Rioja because it is difficult to grow and gives very little fruit. In 1985 they made a 100 per cent Garnacha Reserva at a time when single-variety Rioja was rare. In 1989 came a barrel-fermented white. In 2001 they turned to Maturana, another local variety that had almost gone, and in 2009 they made a wine from Tempranillo Blanco. In 2019 they opened Valdemar Estates in Washington State, and in 2022 they made a sparkling wine from a single classified vineyard. That is a record of doing things first rather than simply of being old.
They farm more than three hundred hectares of their own vines across all three sub-zones of Rioja, and the top of the range is built around named estates rather than around the Crianza and Reserva ladder: Alto Cantabria, Balcón de Pilatos, Las Seis Alhajas, La Recaja, La Gargantilla, Altos Valdemar and Cana Pomar. Below that sits the Conde Valdemar range proper, which is the classic, well-mannered face of the house: Tempranillo-led reds with proper barrel ageing, plus fresh whites and rosados. The estate wines and the Conde Valdemar range are two different things, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying. The estate wines are made in tiny quantities and only in years that deserve them.
Two of the estate wines say the most about the family. Finca Alto Cantabria is a Viñedo Singular, Rioja's top vineyard classification, made from Viura on an eleven-hectare plateau above the Ebro at Logroño, and it is one of Rioja's single-vineyard stars. Las Seis Alhajas is a 100 per cent Graciano from a 1.4-hectare plot, made only in exceptional years, and it is the wine that best explains the family's obsession with the varieties everyone else gave up on.
The Conde Valdemar Crianza, Reserva and Gran Reserva are the wines most people mean when they say Conde Valdemar.
