Logrono - Rioja Wine Country

April 21, 2025

Hello from Madrid! We made the drive from Logrono this morning. Picked the car up from the parking lot at 7 a.m. and were stopped immediately at a roadblock where the police checked for drunk drivers. Carsten passed the breathalyzer with a 0.0 score. (Easter weekend is a big party!!!) Then it was a nice drive through the mountains, lush and green. A lovely curvy road and not too much traffic.

The arrival to the rental car return was pretty smooth until the last three miles. We entered a tunnel and lost GPS. It was a long tunnel that actually split at one point - and no google to say which way to go - best guess was good enough and we managed. I have never seen a tunnel like this!

We found our apartment, ate lunch, hit the grocery store and are hanging out doing laundry.

Let's take a moment for La Rioja. As mentioned in the first blog, this was a potential Top-5 destination. We had a wine tour scheduled for Saturday.

First stop was Amaren. This is a more modern winery. We had a fantastic tour and wine tasting and learned a lot. The most common red grape of the region is Tempranillo. However, the local wine growers also harvest lots of white grapes. Most red wines from Rioja are actually blends of red and white grapes.

We sampled wine straight from the aging barrels.

Wine and charcuterie pairing:

We got little wine caddies. Super handy!

We bought one bottle of wine to drink while in Germany. Sending wine home was expensive considering the tariffs (I had heard that Spain would pay the tariff?!?! LOL) and shipping. Oh well! However, having wine here in Spain in a bar or restaurant is super cheap. A good glass of wine will be 2 or 3 Euros.

Next stop was an OLD winery from the 16th century - Lecea. Many of the wine growers stopped producing themselves and now work in a co-op where they share in the production of the wine based on the grapes they produced.

Here we descended into the wine caves some 30+ feet below the surface.

Don't worry, this is not dust! It is mold.

This is an 80-100 liter (this would weigh up to 200 pounds full of wine!) goat skin (turned inside out - you could feel the hair inside - ugh) that was used to carry the wine up to the surface (we are in the caves).

Happily, their mold-infested, goat-hair filtered wine was very good!

Final stop was at the home of our tour guide. We had a lovely lunch (with wine) followed by a tour of a vineyard and then a blind taste testing.

We had only 7 people on the tour, 4 Aussies, one woman from Chicago (Valerie) and us. It was a great group!

On Easter Sunday we were not sure what would be open. We slept in a bit, had breakfast and went for a walk along the river. Around noon we picked up Valerie and headed out to Muga Winery that she had found out about.