Sierra Cantabria
Spain’s most exclusive and luxurious wine estate, five wineries across Rioja and Toro, and a family whose finest bottles include Teso La Monja, CVC and Mágico.
The Egurens describe themselves, with characteristic understatement, as vineyard collectors. They have been acquiring exceptional parcels for generations and have produced wines under their own labels since 1957. While the rest of Spain is only now beginning to talk seriously about single vineyard wines, Sierra Cantabria has been making them since its inception.
The estate is currently in the hands of brothers Marcos and Miguel Ángel Eguren. Marcos leads the winemaking and Miguel Ángel the business, with all of it overseen by one of our favourite Sevillanos, the chief executive Carlos Caraballo.
The next chapter is already taking shape. Responsibility passes from Marcos to his son Eduardo, and from Miguel Ángel to his son Mikel. Eduardo also founded the boutique estate Cuentaviñas.
It was this instinct for place that produced Señorío de San Vicente. The family replanted a vineyard and built a winery around it so that a single site could make a single wine, the first time that had been done in Rioja. A radical statement in a region defined by blending, it helped begin Rioja’s return to place, and the conversation the rest of the region is only now catching up with.
Five estates now sit between Rioja and Toro. Sierra Cantabria is the home of the estate wines. Viñedos de Sierra Cantabria holds the family’s oenological jewels, among them CVC and Mágico. Señorío de San Vicente remains the revolutionary Rioja. Viñedos de Páganos is the only estate of Rioja Alavesa, set between the beautiful medieval village of Laguardia and Páganos, while the other Rioja estates all sit in the super cru of San Vicente in Rioja Alta. And then there is Teso La Monja, the winery they built in Toro when they sold Numanthia to LVMH.
Viticulture is organic, with biodynamic practices and no mechanisation. As Marcos says, you can destroy millennia old soils with a single pass of a tractor.
Winemaking is minimal intervention. The finest fruit is destemmed by hand, machinery being reserved for the estate wines, the skins are gently massaged, sulphites are used very sparingly and nothing is clarified. Marcos puts it simply: make a good wine from healthy fruit and there is simply no need. He tells us playfully too that he does not make expensive wines, he just happens to make wines that are worth a lot of money.
Viñedos de Páganos now boasts one of the best wine led restaurants in the country. El Puntido takes its name from the vineyard it sits beside, looks out across Rioja Alavesa, and is very much a destination in itself.
The wines are renowned for their structure, elegance, complexity, ageability and, above all, finesse. These are wines that will outlive all of us.
Innovation runs through everything the family touches. Most recently it brought them together with Xandra Falcó, the Marquesa de Mirabel, in a beautiful collaboration on XF, a Provence style rosé made with the estate. And it reaches its most personal expression in El Gran Vino Blanco, drawn from Spain’s most exclusive white wine parcel and produced in painfully small quantities.
Their inheritance is not simply a group of celebrated wineries, but a conviction that the finest wine begins with an exceptional piece of land and the patience to let it speak.