Bodegas Carlos San Pedro Perez de Viñaspre

Useful Information

Location:	Paganos Kalea, 44, 01300 Guardia, Araba. (42.5539, -2.58577)
Open:	All year Mon-Fri 12:30, 13:30, Sat 11:30, 12:30, 13:30, 17:30, Sun 11:30, 12:30, 13:30. English tours: All year dail 13, 16:30. Online booking recommended, especially for English tours. [2024]
Fee:	One wine: Adults EUR 5, Children (0-17) free. Two wines: Adults EUR 7.50, Children (0-17) free. Three wines: Adults EUR 10, Children (0-17) free. [2024]
Classification:
Light:	Incandescent
Dimension:	T=14 °C, H=85 %.
Guided tours:	self guided
Photography:	allowed
Accessibility:	no
Bibliography:
Address:	Bodegas Carlos San Pedro Perez de Viñaspre, Paganos Kalea, 44, 01300 Guardia, Araba, Tel: +34-609-321-649. E-mail:
As far as we know this information was accurate when it was published (see years in brackets), but may have changed since then. Please check rates and details directly with the companies in question if you need more recent info.

History

1932	family awarded for their wines.
1955	family awarded for their wines.
1981	wine label Denominacion de Origen Calificada Rioja introduced and winery named after the current owner.

Description

Bodegas Carlos San Pedro Perez de Viñaspre is more or less the name of the current owner of the Bodegas, Carlos with the complicated surname. The name was created in 1981, when the wine label Denominacion de Origen Calificada Rioja was created. At that time Carlos San Pedro Pérez de Viñaspre was the owner since 1960. This is a La Rioja winery with daily tours including underground caves for fermentation and storage of wine. The wine cellars are rather small, but they are interesting, more than 600 years old, and located below the cobblestone streets at a depth of 8 m. It seems they were built for a different purpose, the use as a winery goes back only a little more than 300 years. By the way, there are numerous such cellars all across the town, and while they are 8 m deep, they are the reason why no vehicles are allowed inside the town, the danger of a collapse seems too big.

The Carbonic Maceration process is used for young wines. The whole bunches of grapes are not crushed and stay in the fermenting tanks for about 8-10 days. Then the wine is pressed and the skins removed. Wines which sre intended for aging use the Bordeaux or Destemming process. The grapes are passed through a so-called destemmer, which separates the grapes from the stems, then the grapes are crushed. This mixture of loose and crushed grapes is fermented for around 8-10 days. In both processes, the pigments from the skin go into the wine making it very dark. In both processes the grape is finally pressed in a vertical hydraulic press of small volume. The wine is extracted slowly and with little pressure so as not to destroy the structure of the skins and seeds and to obtain high-quality wines. Three different types of wine are produced which are named Lagrima, Medio and Corazón.

The ageing is done traditionally in wooden barrels, made of American and French oak. The wine ages typically between 20 and 32 months. The winery owns 200 such wooden barrels, but most of them are not here in the hostorical celle, but in the modern winery outside the town. The cellar also has niches into which the bottles are stacked for further aging.

This is a family owned winery, and the tours are often given by one of the owners. The San Pedro Family produces wine in Laguardia, Rioja Alavesa for over 500 years. The tours take 35 minutes and are very informative and interesting. The traditional winemaking method in Rioja Alavesa, carbonic maceration, is explained with a short video. Spanish and English language tours are available. This site is recommended by the Laguardia tourist information centre. And last but not least, the tours are cheaper than other wine cave tours. The money is for the tasted wines, if you take a tour without wine tasting, they are actually free.