Bodegas Remírez de Ganuza

Sorting fruit before the cellar speaks

The sorting begins before the cellar has its say. Fernando Remírez de Ganuza, winemaker at Bodegas Remírez de Ganuza in Samaniego, built that discipline into the house from its beginning in 1989. He came to the bench by way of the vineyard, after years in the 1970s and 1980s buying and selling parcels across Rioja Alavesa, reading exposure, ground, age and timing before he made a winery carry his name. That earlier work matters here because the bodega is not arranged around a single romantic idea of Rioja. It is arranged around selection. The estate works with around 80 hectares of vineyards across several villages, with average vine age given at about 50 years, and the fruit is treated as a set of decisions rather than a mass of grapes. Tempranillo leads the reds, with Graciano, Garnacha, Viura and Malvasía also part of the house vocabulary. Fernando’s signature wines, Reserva, Gran Reserva and Iraila, belong to that same line of thought: choose hard, interfere lightly, let the vineyard’s season remain legible in the glass.

Gravity, small tanks and Trasnocho

The method at Bodegas Remírez de Ganuza is contemporary Rioja with a cellar-worker’s suspicion of force. The winery uses gravity-fed movement and small conical stainless steel tanks designed for its own work, keeping handling close and extraction controlled. Red wines ferment in small stainless steel tanks and French oak barrels, with malolactic fermentation in new barrels. The house’s better-known technical gesture is Trasnocho, developed after tests beginning in 1992, to draw wine without friction or oxidation. It is a mechanical answer to a sensory problem: how to move deeply colored Rioja without asking the fruit to pay too much for the transfer. Since 2003, the wines have been made from estate vineyards, bringing vineyard selection and cellar selection into one continuous discipline. In 2005, the winery also began washing grapes in must, another adjustment aimed at preserving the quality of the fruit before fermentation begins. None of this reads as ornament in the cellar. It reads as a series of limits placed on damage.

Brick over concrete in Samaniego

The winery sits in the historic center of Samaniego, at the foothills of the Sierra Cantabria, but the building refuses costume. Modern concrete structures wear old brickwork so they sit among the village architecture without pretending to be ancient. The cellar buildings gather around a large central courtyard, divided by a natural waterway, with the practical stages of winemaking held close to one another. The atmosphere is quiet, more workshop than display room. In the tasting room and courtyard, the work’s scale is felt in proximity: old-vine Rioja Alavesa handled by a boutique estate, the sound of movement softened by brick, concrete and the village around it. The place gives the wines a particular frame, not a backdrop. Reserva, Gran Reserva and Iraila leave from this courtyard in Samaniego.