Barón de Ley wines combine personality, quality and the heart of Rioja
The esteemed and large Spanish wine producer Barón de Ley is located in the heart of Rioja, Spain’s largest wine-producing region, in Mendavia in a magnificent building complex that the Count of Eguía had built in 1548 as his fortress. In 1568 it passed into the ownership of the Benedictines, and the monks produced wine there and raised sheep in the area until the 1830s. After that, the estate has had several powerful owners, and after many phases and years, the estate finally passed into the ownership of Barón de Ley’s founders in 1985.
Barón de Ley’s philosophy is to make Rioja wines at their finest, respecting the tradition of long oak barrel aging typical of the region. The producer has over 600 hectares of vineyards in different parts of Rioja. The extent of the vineyards, multiple locations and cultivation of ten different grape varieties provide a good palette for the visions of Barón de Ley’s winemakers Pablo Tascón and Gonzalo Rodríguez and for the quality of the wines, from which the producer’s reputation stems.
The producer’s large size does not prevent meticulous wine production. The vineyards produce an astonishing 1.8 million kilos of grapes annually, which are harvested and sorted by hand. Most wines from Rioja are red, but in addition to red wines, Barón de Ley produces white wines and rosés, such as Barón de Ley Blanco and Barón de Ley Rosado de Lágrima.
The producer specializes in Reservas and Gran Reservas, which honor Rioja’s tradition of long aging in French and American oak barrels. Barón de Ley’s aging cellar is the second largest in the world. There are over 30,000 oak barrels in total. They are renewed annually to ensure quality and to preserve the character of the wines from vintage to vintage. In addition to barrel aging and bottle aging cellars, Barón de Ley has steel tanks and concrete tanks for rosés and white wines.
The diversity of Rioja defines Barón de Ley’s winemaking. Creative winemakers develop products and production, experiment with winemaking technologies and also cultivate newer and rarer grape varieties. Barón de Ley’s wines have indeed received many awards, for example in the current year 2021.
Many of Barón de Ley’s wines are specifically food wines. Spanish celebrity chef Omar Allibhoy shows how to prepare traditional Spanish dishes and how to pair them with wines. In the videos below, you can see how to make, for example, classic seafood paella or patatas con chorizo, a potato stew with chorizo sausage.
You can access the entire food video series and free downloadable recipes on Barón de Ley’s pages here.
Read more about Barón de Ley on its producer page.
