It is located under the shade of Toloño, the town of La Rioja Alavesa with the highest number of wineries per inhabitant (43 wineries, 318 inhabitants). In the Right – or Villabuena Álava, according to the Basque Country’s onomastics – the well-known plaque of the Rioja Denomination of Origin (DJ) appears on each door, and in the autumn the sound of tractors breaks the tranquility of the vineyards. The Right is the paradigm of the people who live from grapes and wine. This is where many famous winemakers are based: Luis Cañas, Izadi, Arabarte... as well as many other small wineries. There they know a lot about the crisis that viticulture is going through. In fact, the waters of the Ebro have been a source of pride for many years, especially since the Interprofessional Association of La Rioja opened its doors last March to further reduce the price of grapes.

“I’ll give it to the bomb and you grab it from above!”, “Come on!” The locals are coming to Bodega Cándido Besa. “Now we have the grapes inside and with the pump we homogenize the wine, you know, the temperature, the color, the yeasts...” says Estibaliz Besa. Around 1940 his father founded the winery and today they have almost nine hectares of wine, enough to produce 60,000 bottles. It is a small but dynamic winery that sells wine directly to its customers and produces organic and autoflowering wine.

“The interprofessional has been our claim for many years,” explains Lorentzo Etnño, “and what he’s supposed to do is at least put a minimum price on the grape, say ‘this is the cost of producing the grape,’ that’s the minimum.” Currently, it is estimated that the production of each kilo of grapes costs 0.62 cents euros, but the producer is only paid 0.40. “Here the numbers don’t come out and in four or five years many vineyards will be bottomed out. They used to be good and bad years, but now we have realized that they are bad for a long time.” The attitude of the great winemakers and the entities that regulate wine in

La Rioja has managed to bring the heterogeneous wine sector to the streets, with mass demonstrations in Logroño, convened by the unions. For Besa, the large wineries “have been exploited in the name of the crisis”, especially with a weak collective like the first sector: “There is a lot of individualism in the agricultural world. We are very bad, but we do not come together to exert pressure, there is no such culture, but we should come together at least to put a decent price on the grapes.”

The day after the wine

According to the Spanish Wine Market Observatory, wine consumption has fallen by 10%, but the European Union says that wine production is excessive in the Spanish State –38 million hectolitres– and they are encouraging the elimination of vineyards to “rationalize” this production. Over the years, however, a very different policy has been pursued: “Planting and planting, that’s where we’ve been taken and now it’s coming back,” says Hanceno. Bodegas Cándido Besa makes Sicilian wine, but there are many who were the first winemakers and left the profession to sell grapes to large wineries, especially when the price per kilo was set at 400 pesetas (2.4 euros) in 2000, because the ice hit: “People thought, ‘I have to get rich here.’” The President of the Rioja

Regulatory Council, Victor Pascual, has stated clearly that in order to cope with the decline in exports and maintain the market share, it is necessary to choose the “best wines”. In this sense, the Regulatory Council has once again reduced the quantity of grapes that can be produced by 10%, and in the last decade the number of grapes that can be produced has decreased by 45%, leaving the winegrowers in an even more serious situation. “They’re going to lower their performance, but the original call has a twist on it,” Hábito speaks eloquently of the liberalization that could take place in the wine sector in a few years: "In the context of liberalization, what will happen to all these mammoths? What are they defending, that the producers fall and that they own the vineyards? Today’s big wineries have no vineyards, no tractors or anything. That’s what it’s about.”

But the vagaries of the wine sector go further, and the brick crises are giving it headaches. On the right, one building stands out from all the others: Luxury hotel in Viura. It has been opened recently, after spending four million euros. Many hotels, winery museums and architectural works of this type have been opened in Rioja Alavesa over the years, since the construction companies set their eyes on the wine industry. But the real estate crisis has left many of them in a hurry; some of them are for sale and many others have suspended payments. When will the bubble burst?

Organic grape and wine that shouldn’t be labeled

How can the small producer cope with this situation? What's the alternative? In the words of Lorentzo Etneno “the only thing we can do is make a good quality wine and continue with ours, having a direct relationship with the customer”. Bodega Cándido Besa is a partner of ABRA (Asociación de Bodegas de Rioja Alavesa); they also have customers in different corners of the Basque Country and they also make contacts for direct sales at fairs such as Territama. Thanks to this, they have managed to survive until now. In any case, they say that “we are not marketers”, “it is clear that we have to eliminate intermediaries, but that does not mean that it will save us”. In fact, the eco-brand market could be an exceptional grip, as it is expanding and needs a response.

In the cellar’s comedor, some oenologists from ENEEK’s Organic Agriculture Council are taking samples of the organic grape must in fermentation. “A good wine is expected, it seems that all the baremos are fine,” says Estibaliz Besa. This year the grapes were very good, hard, uncorrupted...” It’s been seven years since they started making organic wine and they have already officially installed one and a half hectares in this way, among others in the Espinal vineyard. The land needs a four-year process to clean it from contamination and from that period the wine made with local grapes can bear the seal of ecology. For those in charge of the winery Cándido Besa, there is a lot of prejudice around the ecological, such as the need to be more expensive. But in their case this is not the case, as Hábito explains, “the production of organic grapes is not more expensive, it tends to be more expensive or cheaper depending on the quantity, because of the costs of labeling.” In Mandernaga four wineries began to produce

organic wine, but today only two come under this label. However, there are wineries that, although not officially, produce organic wine. For Estibaliz Besa and Lorentzo Hater it is necessary to resort to this: “It should not be labeled organic wine, but conventional wine,” they say. They started with organic wine because they saw that they were completely polluting the soil with chemicals: “Now 40 years ago none of this was thrown away, then the chemical fertilizers suddenly came in, and if you analyze the soil it has a lot of imbalances. We're killing the Earth, and we need to take care of it a little bit. It was an ideological choice.”