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Conde de los Andes Winery Guide

Cellar Tours Insight — Since 2003, Cellar Tours has planned private wine journeys through the world’s leading wine regions, pairing tailor-made itineraries with VIP winery visits, fine dining, and expert regional guidance.

Winery Overview

Built by Portuguese workers in the 16th century, the legendary cellars of Conde de Los Andes in the historic village of Ollauri in Rioja are a monument to this venerable wine region’s sacred traditions. Blackened and musty, with low corridors and dripping walls, over 600 meters of passages are today used to store this great brand’s rare old vintages.

Conde de Los Andes boasts a complex and fascinating history, having started life as a premium brand owned by the historic winery Paternina, founded in 1896 by the Eguizabel family. They produced a range of excellent wines for decades – by the 1950s, their renown had even attracted celebrities like Ernest Hemingway. The Conde de Los Andes brand was subsequently created in the early 1960s, produced exclusively from superior estate vineyards.

Indeed, from the outset, outstanding terroir has been at the forefront of the Conde de Los Andes philosophy. The winery is situated in the heart of the Rioja Alta zone, between the Ebro River’s southern banks and the foothills of the Sierra de la Demanda mountain range. These vineyards are considered some of the finest in Rioja, with prices to match!

However, by the dawn of the millennium, the bodega had fallen into a poor state of repair, neglected by its cash-strapped owners. Its salvation came from the Murua family, a well-respected family who owned several bodegas throughout the region. They brought Conde de Los Andes in 2014 to restore the historic brand to its former glory. To that end, Javier Murua invested a lot of time and money into renovating the cellars and buildings, cataloging the 300,000 bottles in the cellar (with wines dating back to 1892), and tasting through all the historical vintages.

Today Conde de Los Andes, despite its historical pedigree, is a poster child for the modern face of Rioja. Eschewing the Reserva and Gran Reserva hierarchy, the Murua family instead focuses on one red release, a 100% Tempranillo-based Rioja of considerable weight, depth, and texture. The white is no less impressive – a delicious Viura-based wine aged in French oak barriques, imbuing it with spicy complexity and remarkable length of flavor. But it is perhaps the semi-dulce wine that is truly outstanding, a late-harvested blend of Viura and Malvasia blended with small amounts of older reserve wine from the legendary Conde de Los Andes back-catalog—a fitting emblem for a resurrected brand now restored to its former glory.

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Further Reading

Author

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James Lawrence

With a passion for food & drink that verges on the obsessive, wine writer James Lawrence has traveled the world in search of the perfect tipple. To date, nothing has surpassed the 1952 R. Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia Rioja Reserva, tasted in the cobweb-filled cellars with owner María José. Meanwhile, James has been writing for a wide variety of publications for over 12 years, including Telegraph, Decanter, Harpers, The Drinks Business, and Wine Business International. He lives in South Wales and returns to his former university city, Bilbao, as much as possible.

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