Laguardia

I drove up to Laguardia from the flatter Rioja towns to the south, and the town does something clever with geography: it sits on a small rise, walled and compact, so that for the last several kilometres of approach it just sits there on the horizon looking exactly like the medieval fortress town it is, ringed by vineyards running out in every direction like a green and gold tide. This is Rioja Alavesa, the Basque-administered northern edge of the Rioja wine region, and Laguardia is its unofficial capital — a town of maybe fifteen hundred people that has been making wine since at least the Middle Ages and defending itself since even earlier.

The walls are original, mostly, built after Sancho VI of Navarre fortified the town in the twelfth century to hold a contested frontier against Castile. You enter through one of the surviving gates and the street plan closes in immediately — this was built for defense, not convenience, and the alleys narrow enough that I could touch both walls with my arms half-extended. What struck me walking those streets wasn’t the architecture above ground, handsome as it is, but what I kept being told was beneath my feet.

The Town That Is Also a Cellar

Nearly every house in Laguardia’s old quarter has a bodega dug into the rock below it, some dating back centuries, connected by an estimated network of tunnels running for kilometres under the town. Families used them to age and store wine long before “wine tourism” was a phrase anyone needed. I took a tour into one — steep stone stairs, the temperature dropping ten degrees in a few steps, oak barrels stacked in chambers carved by hand — and the guide told me this particular cellar had been in continuous use by the same family for six generations. Standing down there with a glass of their crianza, lit by a single bulb, felt less like a wine tasting and more like being let in on something.

Above ground, the Church of Santa María de los Reyes has a portal that took my breath a little — a polychrome Gothic facade, carved in the fourteenth century and still holding traces of its original paint, protected for centuries by an outer wall that was only opened up in the 1400s. Restorers have been slowly reviving the colour in the stone saints ever since, and even half-finished the effect is strange and moving, like watching something wake up.

Vineyards to the Horizon

The real spectacle, though, is what surrounds the walls. From the Balcón de la Rioja lookout just outside town, the vineyards spread out in a patchwork all the way to the Sierra de Cantabria, the mountain range that shields this valley from Atlantic weather and gives Rioja Alavesa its particular microclimate — cooler and higher in elevation than the Rioja of La Rioja proper, which locals here will tell you, not always subtly, makes for a more elegant wine. I won’t referee that argument. I will say the tempranillo I drank on a terrace that evening, watching the light go copper over rows planted in perfectly straight lines toward the mountains, tasted like it belonged exactly where it was grown.

When to go: September and early October, during the grape harvest (vendimia), when the vineyards are working at full tilt and many bodegas open their doors for the crush.