Burgo Viejo — Alfaro, Rioja Oriental

Burgo Viejo isn’t a company that bought some vineyards. It’s the other way round. In the late 1980s six farming families from Alfaro – Castillo Garcia, Galan Garijo, Gurria Garcia, Marques Malumbres, Rivas Marques and Ruiz Casas – pooled their vines and built a winery. They’d been a co-operative selling wine in bulk since the 1950s. Today, with the next generation involved, it’s sixteen families.

The detail that matters: almost all of the 200 hectares are owned by the winery itself. In Rioja that’s unusual – most of the big names buy in fruit. Owning the vineyards means they set the yields, watch the fruit and pick when they decide to, not when a grower decides for them.

The vines average over thirty years old, with some parcels close to a century. The newer plantings are Graciano and Tempranillo Blanco, which the family calls the organic varieties of the future – and which are exactly the wines we carry. The vineyards run the whole length of the Alfaro municipality, from the Ebro valley up to the slopes of Monte Yerga, so there’s real variation in soil and climate between parcels.

Gorka Etxebarria has been the winemaker since 2003. Decanter, the International Wine Challenge and Mundus Vini all rate the bodega among the best in Spain; the organic Graciano took 90 points from Decanter.

Grapes Grown