Producer Rioja, Spain
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. 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, and in 1989 they made what they describe as 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, and in 2023 they took the Sustainable Wineries for Climate Protection certification. They have 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. Conde Valdemar is the classic, traditionally aged Rioja line: Crianza, Reserva and Gran Reserva, plus a white, a rosé and 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. So Conde Valdemar is one range among several, not the house name.
The whites carry Tempranillo Blanco, the variety this family put on the map, and the Reservas and Gran Reservas are properly aged traditional Rioja from the family's own old-vine plots. The single-vineyard Maturana is the wine that shows what forty years of this family's stubbornness actually produced.
Winery at Oyón, Rioja · Maturana · £42.95 a bottle
