Spain's wine regions, from Rioja to the Rías Baixas

Rioja follows the Ebro across La Rioja, Álava and Navarra in three zones, the Rioja Alta, the Rioja Alavesa and the Rioja Oriental, and in 1991 became Spain’s first Denominación de Origen Calificada. Tempranillo fills most of the vineyard. Haro’s station quarter has what the regional tourist board calls the greatest concentration of century-old bodegas in the world.

We would visit Muga there, founded in 1932, which ferments in oak vats and has its own cooperage; Marqués de Riscal at Elciego, the bodega of 1858 beside the hotel Frank Gehry designed; and the Vivanco Museum of Wine Culture at Briones, with a garden of more than 220 vine varieties. The table is the region’s own: lamb cutlets grilled over vine prunings, and potatoes Rioja-style. More on our wine tasting in Rioja page.

The Priorat’s vines climb slopes that average close to 30 per cent below the Montsant ridge, on llicorella, the local slate, where the Carthusians of Scala Dei made wine from the 12th century. Garnacha and Cariñena are its grapes. Catalonia made it a Denominació d’Origen Qualificada in 2000, one of Spain’s two, and most of the villages of the D.O. Montsant, a denomination of 2001, lie in the same comarca.

We would visit Cellers de Scala Dei beside the old charterhouse, which bottled the first Priorat wine in 1878; Clos Mogador at Gratallops, whose first vintage in 1989 was among those that, in its own words, turned the Priorat’s wines around; and Mas Doix at Poboleda, in the cooler part of the region, whose oldest vines on the slate were planted in 1902.

Sherry comes from the chalk country around Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the triangle at the heart of the D.O.: low hills of albariza, a limestone soil that turns a dazzling white in the dry months and stores the winter’s rain for the vines. Palomino makes the dry wines, Pedro Ximénez and Moscatel the sweet. Fino ages under a veil of yeast, the flor, and manzanilla the same way in Sanlúcar alone; amontillado begins under flor and finishes in contact with the air; oloroso is fortified so that no flor grows.

In Jerez we would visit González Byass, the house of Tío Pepe since 1835, whose La Concha bodega is attributed to Gustave Eiffel; Lustau, which makes its wines in all three towns of the triangle; and Bodegas Tradición, for its long-aged sherries and its collection of Spanish painting, Goya, Velázquez, Murillo and El Greco among it. Jerez’s horse fair, the Feria del Caballo, runs from 24 April to 1 May in 2027 (our Feria de Jerez guide), and the harvest from August into September. Sherry at the table is in our guide to Spanish gastronomy.