Valdemar

Bodegas Valdemar is in Oyón, a small town in Rioja Alavesa just across the Ebro from Logroño, and it belongs to the Martínez Bujanda family, who have been making wine there since 1889. That is five generations and, by the family's own count, more than 137 years. The first cellar was a narrow stone building in the town. Today the estate farms more than 300 hectares of its own vineyard, spread across all three sub-zones of Rioja rather than concentrated in one.

The name to know is Jesús Martínez Bujanda, the fourth generation, who created Bodegas Valdemar with his father in the 1980s and spent the next thirty years doing things Rioja had not done. His children Ana and Jesús run it now.

That record of firsts is the real reason to pay attention to this estate, and it is unusually well documented. They were pioneers in bringing back Graciano, a difficult, low-yielding native grape, in 1982. They installed temperature control in 1985, which they claim as a European first. In 1989 they made the first barrel-fermented white wine in Spain. They made a 100% Garnacha Reserva when nobody else in Rioja bothered with Garnacha, and they were first to bottle Tempranillo Blanco on its own. In 2001 they went after Maturana, a Rioja variety that phylloxera had all but wiped out in the 1920s, recovering 35 surviving vines from a century-old vineyard and replanting them. The first single-varietal Maturana followed from the 2005 vintage. In 2015 they started a biodiversity project in the vineyards; in 2023 they took the Sustainable Wineries for Climate Protection certification, renewed in January 2026. They have also been exporting for over forty years, to more than fifty-five countries, and since 2018 they have run what they describe as the only fully accessible and inclusive wine tourism operation in the world. There is a second winery, Valdemar Estates, in Walla Walla in Washington State.

The wines are organised into ranges rather than sold under one label, and that is where almost all the confusion about this producer starts. Conde Valdemar is the classic, traditionally aged Rioja line: Crianza, Reserva, Gran Reserva, plus a white, a rosé and two Tempranillo bottlings. Alongside it sit the estate wines, single-vineyard bottlings from named plots such as Balcón de Pilatos, Las Seis Alhajas and Finca Alto Cantabria, and above those a small Viñedo Singular tier. Conde Valdemar is one range among several, not the house name.

Conde Valdemar is the same bodega under a different range name, and it has a page of its own, so it is worth looking at both. The Rioja Blanco is the everyday bottle, and it carries Tempranillo Blanco, the variety this family put on the map. The Reserva and the Gran Reserva are properly aged traditional Rioja, and the Gran Reserva comes from the family's own old-vine plots. The one to try if you already know Rioja is Balcón de Pilatos, 100% Maturana from a single 8.2-hectare terraced vineyard at 500 metres. It is the wine that shows what forty years of this family's stubbornness actually produced.