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Guillermo de Aranzabal Bittner, the sixth-generation family member to run Spanish wine group La Rioja Alta.
Wine parlance is filled with oxymorons that only make sense to those of us in the wine trade. Poor soils, excellent grapes. Challenging weather, good wine. But Guillermo de Aranzabal Bittner’s description of La Rioja Alta, his family wine business in Spain, as an “avant-garde classic winery” certainly made me pause. It is an intriguing figure of speech.
You’d expect such wittiness from a veteran but De Aranzabal Bittner is only 27 years old, a lanky, boyish figure who joined his family business in October 2020 as its deputy general director and sixth-generation family member.
The vineyards of Spanish wine group La Rioja Alta
“We are a classic producer but not old-fashioned,” he says, clarifying his quip. “We are a company that is not scared of changing things.
“We apply a state-of-the-art winemaking to our traditional wine styles. For example, we have optical sorting machines for grapes — we were the first winery in Rioja to have them — and we reject about 13 per cent of the grapes [from our harvest] with these machines. The remaining 87 per cent of the grapes have more colour and body, and that has a huge impact on our final wine quality.”
They also import their own oak from the US to make their own barrels, including drying them in different regions, for example, a batch in Rioja and another in Ribera del Duero, to observe how the various drying conditions would influence the toasting of the barrels. The experiment is a collaboration between the winery and the local government’s economic development agency.
Most wineries in Rioja, says Guillermo, are either very traditional or very modern. La Rioja Alta falls somewhere in the gap between these two camps, he adds. “We take the best of both worlds,” he says. “We are classic in terms of our wine style but not how we get to that style.”
Family legacy steeped in winemaking
La Rioja Alta was founded in 1890 by five families in the Rioja and Basque regions, and today functions as a group overseeing four winery brands across Spain: La Rioja Alta, its flagship, in Rioja Alta; Torre de Ona in Rioja Alavesa; Lagar de Cervera in Rias Baixas; and Áster in Ribera del Duero. The group owns 730 hectares of vineyards and produces about 3 million bottles a year.
The founding families are still shareholders of the company, and successive generations of their family members have continued to work in various roles in the business.
De Aranzabal Bittner, who has a degree in Business Administration and Management from the University of Deusto and an MBA specialising in management and finance from the University of Miami, oversees the exports, marketing as well as general management of the group.
He is not a trained winemaker. “We run a family business. I needed to have a business perspective to delegate [the responsibilities],” he says, on the choice of his education background. “We prefer to leave the winemaking to the professionals; we define the style of the wines and our winemakers try to make that style.”
Ripe for innovation
Rioja is the land of Tempranillo, a red grape that makes bold, structured wines. La Rioja Alta doesn’t apply an overarching style to its wines: the flagship winery focuses on making rounder, more elegant styles, with its Tempranillos aged in American oak, the wood traditionally used for its maturation, while over at Torre de Ona, the wines take on a slightly modern approach, with its Tempranillos aged in a mix of French and American oak.
New products undergo years of R&D before they are released. For example, Torre de Ona’s Finca Martelo, a blend of Tempranillo and small amounts of Mazuelo, Garnacha and Viura, was the result of a decade of in-depth research on old vineyards in Rioja Alavesa.
The 2015 vintage of the Finca Martelo is delightful; a balanced and plush wine with intense aromas, hints of vanilla, and savoury touches of smoked meat. Tannins are round and sweet. It’s not your old-school leathery Tempranillo but rather, a crowd-pleasing Tempranillo that still retains some of the grape’s traditional rusticity. It is, well, to quote De Aranzabal Bittner, an avant-garde classic.
An ultraviolet QR code on each wine bottle for traceability
De Aranzabal Bittner says his company doesn’t go after short-term winemaking trends. “When fruity wines became trendy in Spain, we didn’t follow it because that’s not our business at La Rioja Alta,” he says. “For example, our top Gran Reserva 890 from La Rioja Alta spends six years in barrel, so by the time we release it, whatever wine trend there was would have been over. We prefer to follow the long-term trends so our wines can be liked by many people.”
However, when it comes to the business side of things, the company is open to change and adaptation, he says. “One of the main challenges of our company is to get all 250 of our employees to adapt to new ways of working,” he adds.
For example, every bottle of wine now comes with an ultraviolet QR code for traceability. “It’s not easy trying to explain to a 50-year-old employee in the warehouse that he now has to go around the building with a scanner to scan all the QR codes,” he says.
Job roles have also become a little more fluid and flexible. The company’s accountants now have to learn how to show visitors around the winery in case there is a shortage of guides.
Asia remains an important wine market
When the pandemic struck in 2020, they drafted out a three-year long renewal plan, a core part of which included diversifying their exports and focusing on new markets and regions.
Asia remains an important region. South Korea is their fastest growing market and India is in their sights. In Singapore — a key market for them in Southeast Asia — wine importer Cellarmaster Wines is the exclusive distributor of La Rioja Alta. De Aranzabal Bittner reckons there are still many opportunities in the region, citing Indonesia as a potential market.
They currently export 65 per cent of their wines, and he wants to increase this figure. Last year, they entered 17 new markets, namely in South America and the Middle East. “Right now, we are in over 70 countries. We plan to hit 90 by year end,” he says.
In Spain, they have also reorganised their sales operations: they weren’t happy with their appointed distributor in Madrid, so he and his father decided to send their own sales and distribution staff to be based in the capital. De Aranzabal Bittner thinks they are probably the first winery in Spain to have such a delegation in Madrid.
“As a company with a history of more than a hundred years, you sometimes encounter very old ideas that get stuck along the way,” he says. “At some point, you have to stop and renew them.”
