Artuke

The de Miguel family has grown grapes at Baños de Ebro, a small village on the Rioja Alavesa side of the Ebro, for four generations. For most of that time the fruit went to the big houses in Haro. In 1991 Roberto de Miguel broke with that arrangement and started bottling under his own name, driving around the region selling wine by hand. His two sons gave the estate the name it carries today: Artuke, from Arturo and Kike.

Arturo joined his father in 2003 with degrees in agricultural engineering and oenology, convinced that extraction and new oak were the way forward. He changed his mind quickly. Kike followed in 2010, and together the brothers studied the soils of 32 separate plots, a survey that reset the project around site rather than around the ageing categories Rioja has traditionally sold on. "The key word is balance," Arturo says.

Farming is organic and every vine is bush trained, without a trellis anywhere on the property, which means the work is done by hand. The cellar is deliberately plain: whole or lightly destemmed fruit, indigenous yeasts, short macerations with no hard extraction, and ageing in large neutral wood rather than small new barrels. As founding members of Rioja 'n' Roll, Arturo and Kike helped push the region toward village and single-vineyard bottlings.

The range runs from a carbonic village red to La Condenada, a three-quarter-hectare field blend planted in the 1920s and now among the most sought-after wines in Rioja.