May 22, 2025
A Day off in Laguardia
Laguardia is a charming and fascinating wine town, as we learned today. We were on the slow boat when we woke up. We didn’t have a lot planned and were generally tired after five days on the bike. Our breakfast at Castillo el Collada was forgettable, although since it only 8.50 euros, I guess we shouldn’t complain. The only idea we had for the day was to do a wine tour. We had tried to book something the evening before at the Tourist Office to no avail and my attempt to email the bodega in the evening didn’t go anywhere. When I was unable to make a call with my phone to a Spanish number (pretty lame I admit) the lady manning the front desk kindly called and scheduled a 1:00 wine tour in English at Bodega Carlos San Pedro in the old town of Laguardia.
It was a good day to be off the bike: the temperature had dropped about 10 degrees (F) and it rained. We wandered over to the Bodega and had a low-key but excellent tour.
Carlos San Pedro winery has been in business for 500 years and has existed in the City of Laguardia for 300 years. It’s a small family run operation (Carlos, our tour guide, his brother and, as Carlos said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, his mother). They only produce 40,000 cases of wine per year and have 24 hectares of land where they grow grapes. The only grapes they use are from their own land and they don’t employ a winemaker. He said the kids in the family all go to college but nobody studies viticulture or oenology. It felt pretty authentic. The predominant grape in the Rioja is Tempranillo. There is some minor production of a few other red and white grapes but it’s a tiny percentage of the grapes grown.
The tour involved a visit to the underground cellars that exist under Laguardia. These caves were built for defense in medieval times and indeed Laguardia has had to defend itself on many occasions during the Middle Ages and finally during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Eventually, the locals figured out the caves could be used for storing wine, because the temperature and humidity were just right. There are hundreds of underground cellars in the town, all owned and maintained by the various wineries. Traffic is limited in the town center to avoid vibrations that could interfere with the caves.
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Carlos pulled some wine in a tank out with a pipette so we could taste some new wine before it gets bottled, and then a crianza, and finally a gran reserva, which was lovely. We ordered 6 bottles to be shipped back to Oregon and supposedly this package is set to arrive in October. We shall see. The tour included an older Dutch couple and two American women, and it just reminded us of the frustration we feel with American tourists; the younger woman was just so loud, and uninformed, it made us cringe with embarrassment.
We were feeling super low energy so we booked a table at the hotel restaurant, and turned out to have an amusing dinner, primarily because we were the only diners. Not sure what’s going on with that: it was good, not great and we had the most fun as the Spanish waitress tried to tell us what was for dessert: besides the usual flan, ice cream, tiramisu, there was a chocolate item on offer “that wiggled.” We played 20 questions: was it pudding, ice cream, brownie, molten cake? We ordered it just to see. It was a very good molten cake with vanilla ice cream!
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