The capital of Rioja Alta wine — Gran Reservas ageing in the oldest bodegas in Spain, the Battle of Wine festival, and the Ebro riverside at harvest
Haro is the wine capital of the Rioja Alta subzone — a small city (12,000 people) on the Ebro River in La Rioja autonomous community, 45km west of Logrono, with the Cantabrian mountains forming a wall of protection from the Atlantic northwest that creates the thermal conditions for Rioja's finest tempranillo vineyards. Haro has the highest concentration of historic bodegas in Spain: the Barrio de la Estacion (Station Quarter — the bodegas built around the 19th-century railway station that gave Rioja its market access) contains CVNE, La Rioja Alta, Muga, Lopez de Heredia, and Bilbainas within…
The Rioja wine region owes its 19th-century development to the phylloxera crisis — when the vine louse devastated French vineyards in the 1860s-1880s, Bordeaux wine merchants crossed the Pyrenees looking for wine to import under their own labels, and found the Rioja's tempranillo on the south slope of the Cantabrian mountains already making structured red wine. The French merchants brought their barrel ageing techniques (the Bordeaux 225-litre barrique replacing the local 500-litre casks) and the concept of chateau-style marketing. The first-generation Haro bodegas were all founded in this pe…