Whoo hooo! We did it! We’ve finally released our best newsletter to date, or so we humbly believe. Having started this adventure last November with a full report on Port wines, followed by a second newsletter on Spanish Cava wines, we are ecstatic to announce our third newsletter on La Rioja wines. After 3 weeks of 16 hour work days, we are proud to give you….drum roll please….!

We created a website dedicated to the wines and food of La Rioja, along with many other fun treats, including: an interactive map of Rioja, marking our experiences throughout our seven day trip; a full album of La Rioja photographs displaying everything from the smallest winery we experienced at Bodegas Arranz-Argote to the most ingenious barrel hoisting device at Bodegas LAN; a complete archive of every article we’ve written at Catavino.net on Rioja; an explanation on Rioja cuisine; how to read a Rioja label; and to top it all off, 30+ winery profiles and 200+ tasting notes! We hope you enjoy it!!

Here are some things you should know about this project:

• 1. We will continue to update our La Rioja report each and every time we taste a Rioja wine. No matter if it is tomorrow, or in three years (assuming Catavino will survive that long ;-)), this archive will build upon itself to create a lattice work of interconnected tasting notes, winery profiles, articles and photos.
• 2. You are a integral part of our Rioja report’s success. We ask you to please add your comments under any and all Rioja wines, profiles and articles. Let us know if you agree with our notes, disagree, or if you’d like to chime in with a few thoughts just because you feel moved to do so. As we said, this is a living and growing entity that requires your experiences, as much as it requires our own. Join our Rioja Flickr group and comment to your heart’s content on any tasting note, because we’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts!
• 3. We’re hoping that we’ve settled on a template that will last well into the future. Although we’ve been known to continually reinvent the wheel at Catavino, I don’t think we have any intentions of recreating this…again. Having spent an inordinate amount of time designing, creating and implementing the website, I trust that we’ll be keeping it true form for at least a while. The question remains, what region is Catavino going to tackle next? Well, to be honest, we don’t have any strong commitments as of yet, but it does appear that Valencia has been whispering sweet nothings in our ears, making it probable that you will be receiving another onslaught of regional info in the near future!

Finally, we would like to say thank you for helping us make this Rioja regional report a blast to create. From your inquisitive questions to your witty comments, these reports wouldn’t be nearly as exciting and interesting if you weren’t a vital part of it. We’d also like to thank Vibrant Rioja and La Rioja Tourismo for all of their support, not to mention all of the wineries who took the time and energy to talk with us. But this is hardly the whole story of Rioja and because of that we want to offer up some of our favorite resources for Rioja wine, and tasting notes. Please take a look at Blame it on Rioja,Planeta Vino and Dave over at Tinto y Blanco.

One last note. We’ve included a Wine Zap search box on the sidebar to help you find the wines you’re interested in (please let us know if you like this). However, we encourage you to check out some of our friend’s online wine shops who also may be able to help you find some of your favorite wines from La Rioja, such as: Excel Wines, Domaine 547 and Andrew Chapman Fine Wines.

Cheers and please let us know what you think!

Gabriella and Ryan Opaz

P.S. If you are a Rioja winery and were not included in this report, please contact us to find out how your bodega can be included.