CVNE

Compañía Vinícola del Norte de España was founded in Haro on 24 March 1879 by the brothers Eusebio and Raimundo Real de Asúa, in the Barrio de la Estación, when French merchants ruined by phylloxera were buying Rioja wine beside the railway line. Six years later, at the 1885 Antwerp World's Fair, it was already winning silver and bronze medals. The house remains in the hands of the founders' direct descendants, now in the fifth generation.

The ageing hall in the Barrio de la Estación, designed by Gustave Eiffel's studio and built between 1890 and 1909, holds up its roof with steel trusses and has not a single column. Inside the same premises works a small, independent winery devoted to one wine alone: Imperial.

Imperial has been made since the 1920s, and only in vintages the house judges exceptional. The name comes from a special bottling for the English market in a measure called the imperial pint. The winery keeps a lot of every vintage of Imperial Gran Reserva, back to the first, for vertical tastings.

Viña Real dates from the same decade, launched in 1920, with a new winery opened by King Juan Carlos I in 2004; Viñedos del Contino followed in 1973, created with the owners of the Laserna estate as Rioja's first château. Imperial Gran Reserva comes from twelve hectares of dry-farmed bush vines in Villalba and Torremontalbo, at the foot of the Toloño range, with 24 months in new or once-used French and American oak.