THE HISTORY OF LA RIOJA: A CHRONICLE OF SPAIN'S WINE COUNTRY AND CRADLE OF CASTILIAN IDENTITY

THE HISTORY OF LA RIOJA: A CHRONICLE OF SPAIN'S WINE COUNTRY AND CRADLE OF CASTILIAN IDENTITY

From Cave Paintings to World-Class Vineyards: The Untold Story of La Rioja Most people know La Rioja only from wine labels, but this small region in northern Spain has an extraordinary 25,000-year history. It gave the world the first written words in Spanish (around 977 AD), endured three brutal civil wars, survived Franco’s repression, and rose from near-total economic ruin to become one of Europe’s top wine regions. In this fast-paced, novel-like narrative, Carlos Costa Martins draws on decades of research in archives, monasteries, and family records to bring the story alive. You’ll meet Celtic warriors resisting Rome, the monk who jotted the earliest Spanish phrases, French engineers carving roads through mountains in the 1760s, and the vintners who rebuilt after the phylloxera plague devastated their vineyards in 1899. The book traces La Rioja’s role as a Carlist battlefield, its suffering under dictatorship, its rebirth as an autonomous region in 1982, and its global breakthrough when Robert Parker awarded a Riojan wine 96 points that same year. Rigorous yet jargon-free, packed with vivid human stories and clear explanations of how geography, war, and culture shaped one small place into a giant of wine and language.