Bodegas Lanzaga (Las Beatas)

The Free Bacchus Story

When Telmo Rodríguez and Pablo Eguzkiza found Las Beatas, the terraces were under thyme, lavender and rosemary and had been for years. Ten levels of them, built out of sandstone blocks on the north-western edge of Rioja Alavesa near Labastida, facing east, south and north-west across 1.9 hectares.

They bought it in 1998 and released the first wine in 2011. Most of those thirteen years went on rebuilding the terrace walls by hand and replanting the gaps with cuttings taken from the vines that had survived on the site. There is no commercial calculation that produces that decision; it only makes sense if you have already decided the place is worth it.

Eight or nine local varieties are mixed through the rows rather than blocked out by type. That is how Rioja was planted before the twentieth century tidied it into single-variety parcels: everything ripens together, everything goes into the vat together, and the wine is a field blend rather than an assembly.

Las Beatas itself is made in tiny quantity. Lanzaga, the estate wine, sits at around forty dollars and carries the same thinking at a price that can actually be tested.

Rodríguez has spent a career arguing that Rioja’s great sites were forgotten rather than absent. A vineyard nobody could see under the scrub, rebuilt stone by stone over thirteen years, is that argument made in the most expensive way available.