A FOCUS ON... Eguren Ugarte
11/04/2022
Anyone who attended our very popular Spanish wine dinner earlier in the year will probably remember the 2014 Cedula Real Rioja Gran Reserva from Eguren Ugarte. It was a stand-out favourite on the night and we went through what we had brought along for the evening in a flash.
Luckily for our Rioja-lovers, we do have some in stock at Brompton Wine and it’s available on the website at the link below so you can enjoy at home.
Cedula Real 2014
Given its popularity with the Brompton Wine community, we thought we would take a look at the producer behind the wine.
Eguren Ugarte is a family-owned winery based in the foothills of the Sierra de Cantabria mountain range in the heart of Rioja Alavesa. It's a truly beautiful landscape – just look at the accompanying photographs – and the winery also occupies 2000m of ancient caves, which are used for the storage of 4000 barrels of wine, and wine tasting events for visitors and fans.
The vineyards themselves have been around for hundreds of years, but the Eguren Ugarte story began properly 150 years ago and in somewhat of a fairy-tale manner. A healer by the name of Pascasio Pangua (who also happened to own some vineyards…) cured the ill daughter of chocolate trader Victorino Anastasio Oriundo de Bergara and his wife Estefana. In his own elder years, he then moved in with the family whose child he had saved, and when he passed, he bequeathed his vineyards to them in his will. Whether Anastasio and Estefana switched fully from chocolate trading to winemaking is sadly not recorded – it’s extremely pleasant to imagine that maybe they did both - but within a couple of generations the winery was in full swing and now in 2022, we are six generations down the line and Eguren Ugarte is a well-respected producer with 130 hectares of vineyard as well as a hotel.
Their vineyards mix the traditional with the cutting edge. A whole plethora of grapes are grown on site. Native Spanish varieties such as Tempranillo, Garnacha, Graciano, Maturana, Garnacha Blanca, Tempranillo Blanco and Viura grown alongside a few popular international varieties like Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. Their vines are old – some up to fifty years – and they produce red, white and rosé wines.
They pride themselves on on environmental sustainability, which they approach via an in-depth knowledge of their vineyards. Some of their techniques are as old as winemaking itself (manual harvesting) but they are also keen adopters of innovative technology: they have installed their own meteorological stations to measure humidity, temperature, rain, and they utilise soil sensors and infra-red cameras to keep an eye on the vineyards. This level of oversight allows for precision viticulture, and means that they can maximise the potential and quality from every plot of land whilst making as few interventions as possible - they don’t even irrigate their vineyards, relying solely on the weather conditions year on year.
It all results in some wonderful wines. We stock a Rioja Gran Reserva (the aforementioned Cedula Real ) and a Rioja Blanco Crianza. They're both a great taste of Spain.
If you'd like to know more about the producer, then visit their website here (you'll need some Spanish or to get Google translate involved)
