Bodegas Olarra

Tasting for continuity in Logroño

Javier Martínez de Salinas tastes for continuity as technical director at Bodegas Olarra in Logroño, holding Rioja to the evidence of the cellar rather than to gesture. His route to this station began with the University of Navarra, then quality control work at Agrovin in Alcázar de San Juan until 1989. From 1989 to 1998 he worked at El Coto de Rioja S. A. in Oyón as winemaker and head of quality and production, a pairing that explains the cast of his work now: the wine has to read well in glass, but it also has to survive repetition, scale, and time. Since 1998 he has carried the technical direction of Bodegas Olarra and Bodegas Ondarre, with a wider brief that also reaches Bodegas y Viñedos Casa del Valle. At Olarra, that means the pass is not a restaurant pass but a sequence of decisions between vineyard material, fermentation, aging, blending, and release. Cerro Añón, El Rayo Olarra Crianza 2022, Olarra Cuvée Especial Gran Reserva 2019, and Olarra Cuvée Especial Reserva 2020 give that hand different registers without leaving the house frame.

A barrel cellar under 111 domes

The method here is built for Rioja scale. Bodegas Olarra works with more than 200 growers across the region, with particular attention to Rioja Alta and parcels often smaller than a hectare. Tempranillo carries much of the red work, joined by Garnacha, Graciano, and Mazuelo; Viura and Tempranillo Blanco sit in the white program. The winery describes its farming direction as sustainable, with old Rioja practice adjusted to modern cellar control rather than replaced by it. Maceration is extended for structure and depth, then the wines move into a large aging program with around 25,000 Bordeaux barrels. The room above those barrels matters. The cellar roof is crowned by 111 hexagonal domes, made to soften temperature movement without external systems. It is architecture as cellar discipline, not ornament applied after the fact. In a house founded in 1973, the long way is visible in oak, concrete, tanks, and the quiet pressure of maintaining a Rioja line across harvests.

The Cathedral of Rioja at work

The building does not behave like a neutral container. Its Y-shaped plan gives the winery a central movement, a crossing point where production, aging, and tasting all feel connected to the same method. From outside, the structure sits on the outskirts of Logroño, close to industrial ground and Rioja Alta countryside at once. Inside, the cellar pulls the attention downward. Barrels repeat in rows, the domes catch the eye overhead, and the air belongs to oak, age, and controlled temperature rather than theatre. Tastings and tours pass through that working architecture, but the strongest part of the place is the sense that the room was drawn around the wine’s needs first. The house has one current award, and the cellar’s daily demand is to keep the blend, the aging, and the bottle aligned under the 111 domes.