BADIOLA

Badiola is in the heart of Rioja Alavesa. Founded in 2018, Badiola offers village and single vineyard wines that display the freshness, elegance and depth of flavours which we believe distinguish the great wines from Rioja Alavesa. They cultivate over 300 parcels of extraordinary vineyards on the slopes of the Sierra Cantabria, mainly in the villages of Villabuena de Alava, Leza, Samaniego, Laguardia, Navaridas and Baños del Ebro. The average age of the vineyards is around 50 years and many were planted in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

Bodegas Badiola aims to bottle some of the most distinctive terroirs in Rioja Alavesa. Behind it are Basque entrepreneur and txakoli producer Gorka Izagirre (Badiola is one of his surnames) and Península Viticulores, who handle the winemaking, managing and selling of Badiola wines. Thus, the two Masters of Wine who form Península Viticultores, Andreas Kubach and Sam Harrop, replicate the model they successfully established with Fontana, the family winery of entrepreneur Jesús Cantarero in Cuenca (Castilla-La Mancha). This precious wine heritage is seen by Kubach and Harrop as a great asset to make wines of place instead of wines of style; wines with finesse, drinkability and the ability to age.

The Burgundy-inspired range of wines is designed as a pyramid covering all categories, from entry-level cuvées to single-vineyard wines. As regulations in Rioja stipulate that village wines must come from the same location where the winery is physically built, Badiola has come up with some ingenuous names to identify its three first releases. The fresh, aerial L4GD4 with crunchy red fruits comes from Laguardia; the rounder, riper V1BN4 with more presence on the medium palate is from Villabuena and the structured, L3Z4 that displays lovely acidity, ripe fruit and cellaring potential originates from Leza.