Bodega Viñedos de Páganos

Stone under the vineyard

Under the vines, the cellar cuts into stone. Marcos Eguren, winemaker at Bodega Viñedos de Páganos in Rioja Alavesa, Páganos, Spain, works from a house built into El Puntido and La Nieta, where the vineyard is not scenery but structure. His route to this bench began nearby at Bodegas Sierra Cantabria in Páganos, first as winemaker and technical director, then through Bodegas y Viñedos Sierra Cantabria as winemaker and director of operations. The titles matter because they place him on both sides of the work: the making of wine and the system that allows a bodega to hold its line.

At Viñedos de Páganos, founded in 1998 within the wider Sierra Cantabria and Familia Eguren project, Eguren’s present role returns to the plainest word: winemaker. The family line reaches back to Amancio in 1870, named in the family account as the first generation of viticulturists in the Sonsierra Riojana. That inheritance shows here as parcel discipline rather than nostalgia. Eguren’s own sentence, “I want to turn Rioja into little Burgundy,” gives the estate its sharpest edge: Tempranillo treated as a language of site, not as a regional generality.

El Puntido and La Nieta by hand

The program is built around two named parcels. El Puntido is a 25-hectare Tempranillo vineyard planted in 1975, set at 600 m elevation in Páganos, with clay-limestone and sandy-clay-loam soils carrying a mineral component. La Nieta is the smaller cut, a 1.75-hectare Tempranillo parcel with poorer, shallower soil and vines described at roughly 30 years of age. The scale tells you how the cellar thinks. Selection starts in the vineyard, and the harvest is hand-picked.

For La Nieta, the method keeps close to the hands: after destemming, the grapes are foot-treaded, then the must ferments in small new French oak vats. The wine spends 18 months in new Bordeaux-style French oak barrels. El Puntido, La Nieta, and El Corner del Puntido make the estate’s clearest architecture, a compact portfolio arranged by parcel rather than breadth. The house works as an organic producer, with Tempranillo at the center and Graciano, Viura, Malvasia, Garnacha Blanca, and Garnacha Tinta in the wider vocabulary.

The cellar holds the slope

The room is calm because the building does not fight the hill. Stone, underground passages, and a modern winery sit beneath the vineyard line, so the cellar feels less like a stage than a continuation of the slope above it. Outside, the estate looks across Rioja Alavesa toward the Sierra de Cantabria; inside, the work narrows to vats, barrels, and the patient separation of one parcel from another.

Hospitality here follows the same register. Private tastings, vineyard visits, cellar visits, and the restaurant above the vines give access to the place without pulling attention away from the wines. At the bench are El Puntido from the 25-hectare vineyard, La Nieta from the 1.75-hectare parcel, and Eguren holding Rioja to the scale of El Puntido.