Watson’s Wine Story | Conde de los Andes

What truly makes the winery special is the fact that it has the oldest and longest underground cellars in use (“calados” in Spanish) of the entire region, being 1 kilometer long and up to 40 meters deep under the hill of Ollauri. And you will have to literally get into the earth to understand the importance of this winery.

Conde de los Andes has a collection of approximately 400,000 wines from older vintages. Many of them are stored in the “calado” of the “Great Vintages”, formerly known as “Sistine Chapel”, a unique space that contains large reserves of mythical harvests such as 1892 or 1910.

It all begins back in the Middle Ages, when people in Riojan villages started to dig into the earth to build their family cellars. The work which can be considered now as an early example of geological knowledge as well as a masterpiece of traditional architecture.

The Conde de los Andes winery owns old underground cellar with a long history; in 1896 Federico Paternina founded Paternina winery in Ollauri and built underground cellar for wine-making. In 2014 the Murua family, owners and managers of Muriel Wines group based in Rioja Alavesa acquired the Conde de los Andes brand, buildings and old vintages stock.

After two years of efforts, Muriel Wines has finally launched the renewed Conde de los Andes wine range; and has re-opened the large and spectacular underground cellar caves of the winery, a masterpiece of traditional wine architecture.

The new Conde de los Andes range is composed by three products: the single red wine, the single white wine and the semisweet. All three answer to a contemporary philosophy which privileges freshness and fruit expression over the presence of wood and flavors from the aging. Still, they preserve the elegance that is common to the best wines from Rioja.

History, architecture, historical wines and the new wines, which are again produced in the winery, make Conde de los Andes, above all and in terms of wine, a cultural icon worldwide.