Álvaro Palacios is one of the most seminal representative of the New Spain. Through discovering and reviving old vine sites, he has spent the last 30 years bringing not one but two Spanish wine regions back from the brink of oblivion. His family roots are in Rioja, where he might have chosen to continue making wine in the same way and palce as his family had been doing for generations. But young Álvaro had other ideas.

The Belondrade story began in the early 1990s, when hispanophile Frenchman Didier Belondrade had a brainwave. He realised he could vinify Rueda Verdejo with barrel fermentation and aging to make a white wine in the Burgundian idiom he so loved. His first vintage was 1994, made with rented vines and borrowed space in someone else`s winery; it was a big commercial hit. Success then followed success, and the Belondrades now have a lavish winery of their own.

Bodegas La Horra is the Ribera del Duero project of Rioja producer Roda. Having spent four years researching the land in Ribera they settled on the best land they could find, much of which was already planted with old vines. Rather than buy it, they formed a new company with the landowners, which saw land management pass entirely to La Horra and its team. The first vintage to be commercialised was 2008 when quantities were very small. Production has since increased incrementally and will peak in 2014.

It`s a timeless style, and one built on a reputation for consistency vintage in, vintage out. Bodegas Lopez de Heredia have been making wine the same way ever since they were founded. The best quality fruit from their flagship vineyard Tondonia is fermented, given long aging in American oak barrels followed by yet more aging in bottle, before finally being released to the market. The result is a wine in a complex and mellow style, as much characterised by primary red fruit (strawberry, raspberry) as it by such developed characteristics as fresh leather, tobacco, game, sage and vanilla.

There aren’t a lot of people who live in the small Catalan village of Capcanes, and of those who do, many are members of Spain’s premier wine cooperative. This cooperative was established in 1933. For decades they only sold fruit or made bulk wine for blending and bottling elsewhere. In the late eighties they watched nervously as their biggest customer, Torres, began buying land in the area. Into this picture stumbled German winemaker Jurgen Wagner.

If any one bodega were to be singled out as the exemplar of the classic style of Rioja, this would have to be it, producing year after year wines of the highest quality and only the highest quality, without a single hitch. They are remarkable. -Julian Jeffs, The Wines of Spain

Jean Belondrade hadn’t been planning to make red wine. Belondrade enjoys a worldwide reputation for Burgundy-like white wines. And if he had, given his winery is in Rueda (northwest Spain) it might have made more sense logistically to go to Ribera del Duero, or perhaps Rioja. But that wasn’t the way things worked out. Gonzalo Cores, an old friend of Jean’s father, invited the Belondrades to go and view a vineyard on sale – at the other end of northern Spain, in the isolated inland hills of Priorat.

Rioja is often classified into traditional and modern styles. While traditional Rioja is marked by long aging in (older) American oak, modern Rioja tends to be defined by shorter aging in often new French barriques, and a more extracted style. Like most neat divisions, it breaks down on close analysis, but nevertheless Bodegas Roda is associated with the modern camp. It certainly isn`t one of the historical bodegas; it was founded in 1986 by a married couple of wine merchants from Barcelona, Mario Rotllant and Carmen Daurella, who sought to create something special.

Once upon a time, Rioja was all about the relationship between wineries and growers. Most bodegas didn’t have vineyards of their own and depended on growers to supply grapes, which meant that in two consecutive vintages a wine might be made from fruit from entirely different sources. Things have moved on since then. Most wineries now consider ownership of vineyards and full control of viticulture essential, and the cutting edge is all about site specificity and named vineyards.

In the hot, dry, inland climate and sandy soils of Montilla-Morilés, Pedro Ximénez is the only grape variety tough enough to thrive. It doesn’t like fermenting to dryness, and always tries to keep back some residual sugar, but it can be used to make phenomenal sweet wines. Toro Albalá have been on the scene since 1844. In their first incarnation, they kept a small wine cellar inside an old windmill where they made wines to be served in the family tavern. A few generations later, in 1922, they were formally (re)founded as a proper winery in the tunnels of an old power station.

Graft, care, precision, and attention to detail at a level most wineries can only dream of; not for nothing has Vega Sicilia represented the pinnacle of Spanish winemaking for over a century. Yet for a wine now regarded as among the world’s best, Vega Sicilia has obscure origins. It began in the 1860s as an attempt to make Bordeaux-style wines in Spain, but did not achieve instant renown. It went through various name changes, not becoming Vega Sicilia till the 20th century. For a long time it was sold in bulk, to be re-sold as Rioja. It wasn’t until the 1920s that it became famous.