Wine · Elciego, Rioja Alavesa
Luberri
A grower's winery in Elciego making honest Rioja Alavesa from old family vines.
- Founded by
- Florentino Martínez Monje
- Based in
- Elciego, Rioja Alavesa
Their story
Luberri is the family winery of Florentino Martínez Monje in Elciego, a village in Rioja Alavesa, the Basque corner of Rioja. Florentino came to wine through farming. His father and brothers worked vines before him, and he still describes himself as a man of the fields first and a winemaker second.
He started by buying his first vineyard plot in Elciego, and Luberri's first young wine reached the market in 1991. The current cellar went up a few years later, and the family, including his wife Mari José and their daughters, has run it since.
Today Luberri farms about 42 hectares of its own and looks after roughly 70 in total, making a little over 400,000 bottles a year.
How it's made
The range runs from a young, fruity carbonic-maceration red in the local tradition to crianza, reserva and single-vineyard wines. Old-vine sites such as Las Salinas, near the Carralogroño lagoon, and the roughly 80-year-old Los Merinos vineyard between Elciego and Laguardia go into the top bottlings. The winery has worked with yeasts studied by the University of Navarra.
Why we carry them
We like Luberri because it is real grower Rioja at a fair price, from a family that has worked the same land for generations. The young red is a great weeknight bottle.
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