Viñedos Hontza

Viñedos Hontza is Iker García and Alice Bridoux, a young couple who connected over shared interests in alternative ways of living and holistic farming, the desire to participate in ancestral traditions, the regeneration of land. García is Basque, hailing from the tiny village of Labraza in the eastern part of Rioja Alavesa, and Bridoux is Belgian. They met after Bridoux spent years studying horticulture, permaculture, and pedagogy in various countries around the world; Bridoux settled in Spain in hopes of finding a place and project closely linked to nature on which to live and work. After Bridoux and García met, they made the decision to return to García’s family vineyards in Labraza to make something special—as García puts it, to reconnect with what his forebears did by developing a new livelihood deeply connected to his native landscape and home village. (García’s grandfather was a shepherd and his father a farmer—about as ancestral Basque as it comes.)

In 2015, the couple began the winery Hontza in Labraza on something of a hope and a prayer—commercial winemaking has never been practiced in this village, but viticulture in this pocket of Rioja Alavesa is common, as part of traditional mixed agriculture along with grain cultivation and animal husbandry. This is a special zone for vineyards: it’s north of the Ebro River, struck through with steep gulleys and valleys carved by the tributaries of the area; the soils here are poor and calcareous, and stone walls and terraces for viticulture have been formed for a century and more; there’s great biodiversity, with lots of surrounding forests and riverbanks intact; and Labraza’s situation is even higher-elevation than much of the lauded subregion Rioja Alta. But the fruit grown here in this special village always has been sold to Rioja domaines farther south, despite a long history of viticulture. As such, García and Bridoux emphasize what a leap of faith it required for them to begin a natural winery on old family land: they wanted a project that would express their desire to live closely with nature and reconnect with tradition but still be commercially viable in an unknown village.

The Hontza wines are authored under the appellation Rioja, but the story here is also complicated: this region is fully Basque in ethnicity, language, and tradition, but the shadow of famous Rioja is long. When drinking the flagship wine, the village-level wine just called ‘Hontza,’ it has notes of which one might think when thinking of Rioja: dark, nearly black fruit and herbs, depth of flavor—but it has none of the common industrial richness, over-oaked styling, and dry, hot notes of compote fruit. The 560-700m range of elevation, proximity to rivers and forests, and limestone-inflected soils are doing their work here. So is García and Bridoux’s insistence on not utilizing chemicals in the vineyards or during the winemaking process, as well as their biodynamic practices; the wine is dominated by freshness, purity, and clarity of fruit expression. The confluence of Atlantic and Mediterranean influences is clear in all of the wines, too, in the balance of ripeness of fruit and coolness and acidity on the palate. The Hontza range runs the gamut in being able to show these dimensions: from playful, experimental wines, in the ‘Too Mahats’ and ‘Vendedor de Humo,’ all the way up to the serious single-vineyard wines ‘Garaya’ and ‘Valtide,’ taken from special parcels of co-planted fruit or superior old vines.

We’re very proud to have the wines of Hontza in our corral: this confluence of Basque-Rioja-Belgian cultures, Mediterranean and Atlantic, old and new, is a unique expression of Iberian wine, part of a new chapter on this peninsula—a reflection of devoted agriculture, rehabilitating old ways, and making wine as a path for young people to have a meaningful way of life.

“We let the grapes speak for themselves.”