Rioja offers wine lovers a Taste of Time

The annual Haro Station Wine Experience which allows wine lovers to visit Rioja’s heartland, taste its best wine and food offerings, and interact with experts, is back in June 2022. And the celebration promises to be memorable.

What do you do when you discover seven world-famous wineries are located in a single cluster in the heart of Rioja? You celebrate with a wine party, of course!

First let’s take a look at Haro itself, and why these wineries are worth celebrating.

The Haro Station (La Cata del Barrio de la Estacion) is located in Haro, a small town in the heart of Rioja during the phylloxera outbreak and during the Industrial Revolution to ensure wine reached Bordeaux, whose vineyards had been devastated by phylloxera. Wine warehouses sprang up around the Haro station, and from these, in time, morphed the great Rioja wineries of today – Lopez de Heredia Viña Tondonia; CVNE (Compañía Vinícola del Norte de España); Gómez Cruzado; La Rioja Alta; Viña Pomal Bodegas Bilbaínas; Bodegas Muga and Bodegas RODA.

The annual  Haro Station Wine Experience allows wine lovers to visit the heart of Rioja’s winemaking, delve into its storied history, taste its wines and taste its exceptional food (San Sebastian, the culinary homeland of Michelin star expertise is but a short drive away.)

After being suspended in 2020, the Haro Station Wine Experience returns with its fourth edition on 18 June 2022 with the sommelier of the Michelin three-starred El Celler de Can Roca, Josep Roca, anointed as ‘Engine Driver of the Year’. The renowned sommelier is this year’s ambassador of this event centred around the culture of wine and food, back after a hiatus (owing to the pandemic). 

“This event is a must for all wine and food lovers around the world and it is a date that we should all save in our calendar to live it in style, surrounded by great wines that are part of the history of Rioja and Spanish wine” says Josep Roca.

As a special add-on event, on Friday, 17 June, the day before the Wine Experience, Josep Roca will lead a special tasting for only 100 guests, focused on the influence of the vintage and climate of very different years on Rioja’s top wines.  This will be followed by a cocktail party with different wines from the wineries that make up the Haro Station District Association.

The sommelier from Girona will open a debate on how the wineries have adapted to the varying vintages brought on by unexpected climate action, and how all this reflects in the wine in the bottle.

Attendees will travel through time, tasting wines from cool vintages and warm ones, older vintages in which heat was not regarded as much a threat as it is today. Until one of the key vintages of this climate change, 2003, a year in which it became absolutely impossible to ignore climate change.

Roca is considered one of the best sommeliers in the world, working at one of the top restaurants in the world. He will trace the evolution of the wines, starting from the vineyardand ending with the wine in the glass, showing how each aspect of the climate and soil is expressed in the wine, from the 1939 vintage until 2019.

 Rioja like many of the world’s foremost wine regions, has not been immune to the climate change, and grapes are grown today in areas which were regarded poor for viticulture a mere 10 years ago. For instance, Bodegas RODA (the youngest and in many ways the most advanced winery in terms of technology and research),  has carried out several R&D studies to understand the problems of climate change.

The title of Engine Driver of the Year is awarded to renowned wine professionals each Experience, and  Josep Roca’s predecessors have been Masters of Wine Sarah Jane Evans (2018), Pedro Ballesteros (2016) and Tim Atkin (2015).