Shipping wine home to the US can cost less than checking another suitcase, or considerably more once freight, taxes and customs handling are added. The right choice depends on how many bottles you buy, where you bought them and whether the winery can legally deliver to your state. For most travelers returning with six bottles, … Read more
Renting a car for a wine trip in Europe makes sense when your hotel and winery appointments are spread across the countryside. It gives you freedom between villages, but it takes some preparation: an acceptable license, the right insurance, a transmission you can drive, and a plan for getting home after tastings. This guide focuses … Read more
The Rioja wine harvest festival filled Logroño for seven days in September 2026, and almost none of it happened in a winery. The grape treading is a civic ceremony held in a city park, the wine fountain runs on a street corner, and the fireworks are scored as a competition. Here is what the week … Read more
Rioja Alavesa hotels sit in a string of hilltop villages rather than in one city, and the choice you make decides how much of the region you can see on foot. Laguardia is walled, closed to most traffic inside and small enough to cross in ten minutes. Elciego, Villabuena de Alava and Samaniego are a … Read more
Where to stay in Haro is a short list, and that is rather the point. Rioja’s wine capital keeps six century-old cellars inside one railway district and only a handful of hotels in the streets above it, so the town rewards walking far more than driving. These six rooms cover the range, from a five-star … Read more
A Rioja barrel dinner is not a restaurant booking with a wine list attached. It is a meal served where the wine is actually made: in a rock-cut cellar that holds 13°C all year, in a dining room suspended over a barrel hall, or at a long table a guide has arranged at the end … Read more
Bodegas with rooms in Rioja are rarer than the region’s size suggests: 571 wineries, and only a handful of them will sell you a bed. The six below all make wine commercially and all rent rooms, from a 1583 family cellar in Elciego to a Frank Gehry building that costs more per night than some … Read more
Rioja wine country runs for 100 kilometers along the Ebro, across 144 municipalities and three autonomous communities, and it is far less uniform than the label suggests. Cool limestone slopes sit under the Sierra de Cantabria at one end; warm, almost Mediterranean flats sit near Alfaro at the other. This guide covers how the three … Read more