Bodegas Valdelana

Origin kept at the cellar door

The decision begins with origin: Juan Jesús Valdelana, owner and winemaker at Bodegas Valdelana in Elciego, keeps the estate work close to the source. His role joins custody and making, not as a title pinned to the wall, but as a daily responsibility in a family winery whose public chronology reaches back to 1583. At this bench, restraint is a method. The wines are asked to carry Rioja Alavesa clearly, with the Ebro River below the village and the Sierra de Cantabria acting as the northern guard of the vineyards. Valdelana’s own language returns to continuity, vocation, and the work of generations; the point is not novelty for its own sake, but a line held through practical decisions. His signature wines, Centum Vitis and AGNVS CRIANZA, sit inside that discipline. They are not presented as departures from the house, but as named expressions of it, shaped by the same preference for fidelity over display.

A garden measured in varieties

The estate farms 247 acres of vineyards in Rioja Alavesa, with a sustainable philosophy that treats soil, water, and vine as parts of the same program. One part of the work is visible in the Garden of Varieties, where over 100 known grape varieties are studied with the Viticulture Department of the University of La Rioja for their behavior in the local soil and climate. It is a living trial block rather than a decorative planting. The house also works with a 1920 Singular Vineyard and an over 80-year-old vineyard, two anchors for a cellar that balances inheritance with selection. The focus remains on still red Rioja, with barrel aging used as part of the house language rather than as ornament. In that sense, the cellar’s modernity is not a break in lineage. It is another tool for keeping the fruit legible.

Below Elciego, the old rooms hold

The place carries its history underground. Bodegas Valdelana works around 15th- and 16th-century cellars, stone rooms that give the winery its lower register before the tasting room opens back toward the valley. Above them, the museum, the Tunnel of the Senses, the lookout terraces, and the Garden of Varieties make the estate more than a production address, but the room does not lose the feel of a working house. Glass, stone, soil samples, old tools, and vineyard air all sit close together. From the viewpoints, the Ebro River valley gives the wider frame: vines in parcels, the village behind, the Sierra de la Demanda in the distance.

The award stays attached to the wine

Juan Jesús Valdelana’s recognition includes Gold, Best Tempranillo in the World, at the AWC Vienna International Competition in 2016. The medal lands inside a house still organized around origin, sustainable vineyard work, and named Rioja wines. If the next glass here carries that line forward, it will likely do so through Centum Vitis or AGNVS CRIANZA.