Bodegas Heras Cordón

A Rioja family that has been digging cellars since the 19th century. Today their Reserva is made ten metres beneath the vines in Fuenmayor, Rioja Alta.

The Heras Cordón story starts underground. In the 19th century the family dug its first cellars into the earth and rock of Lapuebla de Labarca, in Rioja Alavesa. By the 1970s their crianzas and reservas were selling across Spain, and in the 1990s they bought a vineyard in Fuenmayor, Rioja Alta, where the winery stands today.

When it came to building it, they went underground again. The cellar sits ten metres below the vineyard, built from the stone of abandoned 19th-century railway stations, and you walk in through a door rescued from a ruined convent in Segovia.

The family owns 50 hectares and advises the growers of another 60, across Rioja Alta (Fuenmayor, Cenicero, Navarrete) and Rioja Alavesa (Laguardia, Elciego, Lapuebla de Labarca). The vines grow at around 550 metres on stony clay-limestone. The team thins the crop twice each summer, picks by hand into 20-kilo boxes and ferments with native yeasts. The Reserva then spends 18 months in French and American oak.