Bodegas Alegre Valgañon

The story

The Interviewing Trip

In 2012, two years before the winery existed, Óscar Alegre spent a week driving through the villages of Rioja. He was not tasting new releases. He was looking for old winemakers, men and women who had been working during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the years before American oak barrels and high-extraction methods reshaped what Rioja meant on an export label. He asked them how they had made the wine. Nearly all of them described fermenting with the whole cluster, stems included, as a practice so ordinary it barely needed explanation. By 2012, almost nobody was doing it commercially. Óscar drove home with that knowledge, shared it with Eva, and when they built the bodega in 2014, stem fermentation went into the reds from the first harvest.

The Interviewing Trip

In 2012, two years before the winery existed, Óscar Alegre spent a week driving through the villages of Rioja. He was not tasting new releases. He was looking for old winemakers, men and women who had been working during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the years before American oak barrels and high-extraction methods reshaped what Rioja meant on an export label. He asked them how they had made the wine. Nearly all of them described fermenting with the whole cluster, stems included, as a practice so ordinary it barely needed explanation. By 2012, almost nobody was doing it commercially. Óscar drove home with that knowledge, shared it with Eva, and when they built the bodega in 2014, stem fermentation went into the reds from the first harvest.

From the atlas

Bodegas Alegre Valgañón

At A Glance

The Producer

Eva Valgañón grew up in Sajazarra knowing exactly what the land could do. Her great-grandparents grew grapes there, and her father Bautista co-founded the Cooperativa de Haro, the collective that pooled the village's fruit into the regional bulk trade. She went to Italy instead. At an oenology school in Piedmont she met Óscar Alegre, who had trained in Spain under Álvaro Palacios and Telmo Rodríguez, two winemakers who had spent careers arguing that the Spanish countryside held more than its exports suggested.

They founded Bodegas Alegre Valgañón in 2014, returned to Rioja Alta, and farmed in the opposite direction from the cooperative model. No new American oak. No extracted colour. No recipes. The wines are built from old field-blend parcels in Sajazarra and the surrounding hamlets, fermented with stems, aged in neutral French vessels and clay, and released in small quantities.

Place

Sajazarra sits in the western corner of Rioja Alta, close to the Ebro's upper tributaries and the foothills of the Sierra de Cantabria. The climate here is cool and Atlantic-continental, wetter than most of the Rioja DOCa and cooler in the growing season than the sunnier stretches further east. That extra rainfall and lower ambient heat slow ripening, preserving natural acidity in the grapes and keeping alcohol in check. Where much of Rioja built its twentieth-century reputation on warm, extracted reds aged in American oak, the Obarenes sub-area and the Sajazarra parcels produce fruit that ferments cleanly at lower sugars and finishes with more freshness than weight.

The appellation is DOCa Rioja, but the producers farming this corner of the Alta are increasingly using its geography rather than its reputation as the story on the label.

Soil And Site

The Obarenes parcels where Tempranillo grows lie on clay-limestone soils. The Viura parcel at the centre of Las Llanas is a single plot of around 0.3 hectares in Sajazarra itself. The Garnacha that enters the red blend comes from Cárdenas, a hamlet a few kilometres away. Field blends in this part of Rioja were the historical norm before phylloxera replanting standardised varieties across monoculture blocks. Alegre Valgañón works with that older logic: mixed plantings, multiple varieties co-fermented or blended by parcel rather than by formula.

Story

Before founding the winery, Óscar spent a week in 2012 driving through Rioja interviewing surviving winemakers from the region's traditional era, the period stretching from the 1940s through the 1970s before modernisation reshaped the dominant style. He was looking for specific technical knowledge: how Rioja had been made before new oak barrels, carbonic maceration, and extraction-led winemaking became the export standard. The winemakers he visited described stem-inclusion fermentation as a matter of course, a practice that had largely disappeared from bodegas that followed the international playbook.

That trip gave the couple a philosophical anchor. When they established the winery two years later, stem fermentation went into every red from the beginning. The goal, as they have described it, was to renounce recipes and stereotypes in favour of what the parcels in Sajazarra and Cárdenas actually offered. Eva's local roots mattered practically as well as sentimentally. She knew which parcels had been farmed continuously, which had fallen into neglect, and which were worth rescuing before the vines died.

Vineyards And Cellar

Stem fermentation is not a decorative choice here. Whole clusters or partial whole-cluster inclusion adds tannin from the rachis, which integrates differently from skin tannin: finer in texture, contributing to a sense of freshness rather than grip. At this elevation and in this climate, the stems ripen alongside the fruit, so the technique produces aroma lift and longer finish rather than the green bitterness it can deliver in warmer or less carefully farmed vineyards.

In the cellar, Alegre Valgañón uses aged French barriques and demi-muids rather than new wood. Demi-muids hold 600 litres, roughly double a standard barrique, which means a smaller surface-area-to-wine ratio and a slower, gentler exchange of oxygen. Las Llanas is also aged in clay vessels alongside the wood, adding a different kind of micro-oxygenation with no wood flavour transfer at all. The philosophy is that the wood should carry and settle the wine rather than flavour it.

Wines

The range centres on two wines: a red field-blend and the white Las Llanas.

The red is 75% Tempranillo from Obarenes parcels with up to 25% Garnacha from Cárdenas. It is fermented with stems for lift and length, then aged in used French barriques and demi-muids. Production is small. The wine is built for freshness over extraction: the stem fermentation and neutral oak push the wine toward greater purity and a finer tannin frame than most Rioja reds at this price level.

Las Llanas is a skin-contact white from Viura, likely in a field blend with other traditional white varieties from the single Sajazarra parcel. It comes out medium gold with citrus undertones. Skin contact over fermentation delivers creamy tannins alongside the fruit, creating a texture unusual for white Rioja. The wine spends a year in 600-litre barrels and clay vessels. Production in 2021 was approximately 900 bottles. The 2021 vintage was awarded 95 points by James Suckling.

In The Glass

Las Llanas is the wine with the most confirmed sensory detail, and it gives a clear picture of what the cellar is doing. The colour is a medium gold with citrus tones, already signalling the skin contact and the year in vessel. The nose carries lush grass, deep semi-dry herbs, and honeysuckle. In the mouth the intensity is real but not heavy: the creamy skin tannins give the wine grip without dryness, and the mineral frame, drawn from the limestone-influenced parcels, runs through to the finish. The whole effect is of a white wine that behaves more like a lightly structured red in its texture while keeping its aromatic freshness.

For the red, the stem fermentation and the absence of new wood mean the Tempranillo and Garnacha read clearly through the wine rather than behind an oak veil. Expect freshness over weight, lifted aromatics, and a tannin character that is finer than most extracted Rioja reds.

A Bottle To Understand It

Start with Las Llanas. It is a skin-contact Viura from a single 0.3-hectare parcel in Sajazarra, aged one year in 600-litre barrels and clay vessels, released in roughly 900 bottles per vintage. The medium gold colour, the creamy skin tannins, the herb and honeysuckle aromatics, and the mineral finish are all traceable to specific decisions: the parcel, the fermentation method, the vessel choice. No other wine in the Alegre Valgañón range is as fully documented or as visibly distinct from the regional mainstream. The 95-point score from James Suckling confirms the quality; the texture and aromatic profile confirm the approach.

Anecdote

In 2012, two years before the winery existed, Óscar Alegre spent a week driving through the villages of Rioja. He was not tasting new releases. He was looking for old winemakers, men and women who had been working during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the years before American oak barrels and high-extraction methods reshaped what Rioja meant on an export label. He asked them how they had made the wine. Nearly all of them described fermenting with the whole cluster, stems included, as a practice so ordinary it barely needed explanation. By 2012, almost nobody was doing it commercially. Óscar drove home with that knowledge, shared it with Eva, and when they built the bodega in 2014, stem fermentation went into the reds from the first harvest.

Final Word

Alegre Valgañón is a small bodega making a deliberate argument about what Rioja can be when the new-oak playbook is set aside. Eva's family roots in Sajazarra give the project its parcels; Óscar's training and his 2012 research trip give it its philosophy. The wines are produced in tiny quantities, but Las Llanas in particular has established a reputation well beyond the village.

Sources

• https://riojawine.com/en-gb/bodegas-rioja/alegre-valganon/
• https://spanishwinelover.com/winerie/alegre-valganon
• https://www.rarewineco.com/producer/alegre-valganon-rioja/
• https://thespanishacquisition.com/products/las-llanas-single-vineyard-viura-field-blend
• https://www.armitwines.co.uk/wine/2021-las-llanas/13669