Artuke

Traditional Rioja is masterfully blended and aged, but at Artuke, brothers Arturo and Kike show a different kind of mastery—expressing individual vineyards and villages via hyper-focused wines with extraordinary purity.

Ever since their grandfather planted Tempranillo and Graciano on a steep hillside that the brothers affectionately named Finca de los Locos (The Crazy People’s Plot), the de Miguel family has been fascinated with small-scale winemaking. After a stint selling bulk wine, their father Roberto began bottling his own and selling it door to door in 1991. Twelve years later, Arturo brought his Masters in Enology to the operation, and Kike followed in 2010.

Their goal: Take the winery’s focus on terroir to the next level. The family completed soil studies on 32 different plots around the villages of Baños de Ebros, Abalos, and San Vicente and employed organic and sustainable farming practices at each. Eschewing the barrel aging requirements of the Rioja classification system, and often employing neutral oak, they seek instead to give each plot the treatment that will translate its unique terroir most precisely.

The de Miguel brothers, whose names combine to form Artuke, typically make three single-vineyard wines from old-vine sites, along with village wines that combine grapes from carefully selected plots. Yet they’re always looking for new, fascinating vineyards—especially ones with old vines in need of revitalization.

Artuke’s 32 sites might be clustered around the same villages, but they boast subtle climatic and soil differences, ones that Arturo and Kike work tirelessly to translate to the glass.