Remírez de Ganuza

Fernando Remírez de Ganuza did not come from wine. He trained as a draughtsman and set up a meat warehouse in San Sebastián. From 1978 he moved into vineyards, and over twenty years he carried out 2,700 purchases, sales and exchanges of vineyard land in Rioja. By the time he founded his own winery in 1989 he knew the map plot by plot, and that explains the vines he picked around Samaniego. He died on 19 March 2024, aged seventy-three.

The winery is built inside the historic buildings of Samaniego, in the Rioja Alavesa: concrete underneath and the original old brickwork outside. There are more than eighty hectares of tempranillo, viura and malvasía spread over more than two hundred plots in nine villages at the foot of the Sierra de Cantabria: Labastida, San Vicente de la Sonsierra, Ábalos, Samaniego, Leza, Elciego, Navaridas, Laguardia and Elvillar.

The signature of the house is splitting the bunch in two. The shoulders — the upper part, with riper berries — and the tips are separated by hand on the sorting table, and each half goes to the wine that suits it best.

Viña Coqueta comes from a vineyard around forty years old right next to the winery, with 90% tempranillo, 5% graciano and 5% viura and malvasía. The grapes spend twenty-four hours in a chamber at four to six degrees before fermenting, and only the destemmed shoulders go into this wine: the tips are sent to carbonic maceration.

It ferments in small stainless steel tanks and in 7,000-litre French oak vats, goes through malolactic in new barrels and ages twenty-six months in new oak too, 80% French and 20% American.