A winery founded beside the railway in Haro, and a merger that gave it a number.

La Rioja Alta was founded in Haro, the wine town of the Rioja Alta zone, on 10 July 1890, the company says, under the name Sociedad Vinícola de La Rioja Alta. Its founders were five Riojan and Basque families, and the site they chose was the Barrio de la Estación, the district that grew up around Haro’s railway station. English Wikipedia, citing Julian Jeffs’s The Wines of Spain and Jan Read’s Wines of the Rioja, names the five founding partners as Daniel-Alfredo Ardanza y Sánchez, Saturnina García Cid y Gárate, Dionisio del Prado y Lablanca, Felipe Puig de la Bellacasa y Herrán and Mariano Lacorte Tapia.

The company’s own history adds two details that it clearly likes to tell. Its first president was a woman, Saturnina García Cid y Gárate, and its first winemaker was a Frenchman, Monsieur Vigier, who made a Reserva 1890, the wine the company describes as the forerunner of today’s Gran Reserva 890.

The second founding moment came fourteen years later. In 1904, the company says, Alfredo Ardanza, one of the founders and the owner of his own Ardanza winery, proposed merging the two businesses, and a Reserva 1904 was made to mark the union; it became the Gran Reserva 904. The company took its present name, La Rioja Alta, S.A., in 1941.

The business has stayed in family hands. The company says the family of its chairman, Guillermo de Aranzabal, has been involved since 1890 as growers, co-owners and directors, and he was quoted as the group’s president by the Spanish trade journal Alimarket in June 2019. In May 2025 the company and the Spanish business press, including Forbes España, reported the appointment of Guillermo de Aranzabal Bittner as managing director, presented as the sixth generation of the family at the head of the winery.

Two numbers, three registered names and barrels built at home.

La Rioja Alta’s best-known names are numbers. The Gran Reserva 890 recalls the founding year of 1890 and the Gran Reserva 904 the merger of 1904. English Wikipedia notes that each drops the leading digit of its year, which keeps the name from being mistaken for the vintage printed on the same label. It describes the 904 as about nine parts Tempranillo to one part Graciano, with the 890 adding a little Mazuelo. In 2023, the company says, it released the first Selección Especial of Gran Reserva 904.

The other names in the range were registered as brands over the twentieth century, and the company dates each one. Viña Ardanza was registered on 28 September 1942; English Wikipedia describes it as a Tempranillo blend with a share of Garnacha. Viña Arana arrived in 1974, replacing a wine sold as 6º Año, and Viña Alberdi was registered in 1978, replacing the old Tercer Año. Both of those earlier names counted years, the sixth and the third.

The house is also known for doing its own cooperage. The Drinks Business reported in March 2020, on the release of the Gran Reserva 904 from the 2011 vintage, that the winery imports American oak, dries it for two years and builds its barrels by hand in Haro, and that its wines are racked by candlelight every six months.

The company also runs a members’ programme, the Club de Cosecheros, whose first vintage it dates to 1976; the scheme was extended to Torre de Oña in 1997 and to Áster in 2002.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Spanish and Portuguese wine names: Vega Sicilia, Muga, La Rioja Alta, Ramón Bilbao, Esporão, Casal Garcia and Aveleda. Wine brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One Haro house, and the group that grew around it.

From the late 1980s La Rioja Alta grew into a small group with wineries in four places, and the company dates each step. In 1988 it settled in O Rosal, Pontevedra, in Galicia’s Rías Baixas, buying the firm Fernández Cervera Hermanos and renaming it Lagar de Fornelos, S.A., while keeping Lagar de Cervera as the wine’s brand in tribute to its founders. In 1990, the year of its centenary, it planted the first vines of Áster in Ribera del Duero; the Áster winery was built in 2000, at Anguix in the province of Burgos, Alimarket reported. In 1995 it bought Torre de Oña, S.A. at Páganos, in Rioja Alavesa, a purchase the company says included the winery, a mansion, a shrine and 45 hectares of vineyard, and whose first wine was a Barón de Oña Reserva 1989. A new cellar followed at Labastida in 1996.

The group has also added to its footprint at home. Alimarket reported on 21 June 2019 that La Rioja Alta had bought the buildings of the historic Rioja Santiago winery, more than 5,300 square metres on the banks of the Tirón in the same Barrio de la Estación, from the Haciendas Company group; the report described a building used for ageing rather than winemaking and said nothing about the Rioja Santiago brand changing hands. The same report listed the group’s wineries in Haro, Labastida and Páganos-Laguardia for Rioja, in O Rosal for Rías Baixas and in Anguix for Ribera del Duero.

The name needs care in a search. Rioja Alta is also the name of one of the three zones of the Rioja appellation, alongside Rioja Alavesa and Rioja Oriental, so “Rioja Alta wine” can mean any wine from that zone. The company is La Rioja Alta, S.A., with the article, and its own site is riojalta.com.

For a design guide, La Rioja Alta shows how a family company can turn two dates in its own history into the names of its most important wines, and keep a traditional label language steady across more than a century in the same Haro district. Compare Muga, another Haro winery, and Vega Sicilia in Ribera del Duero, where La Rioja Alta built Áster. For this guide we use Gran Reserva burgundy, old gold and label cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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