Remelluri became the first single-estate (monopole) Rioja of the modern era with its release of the 1971 vintage. Remelluri is produced by the brother and sister team of Telmo Rodríguez (winemaker) and Amaia Rodríguez Hernandorena (viticulturist), with Telmo’s winemaking partner, the prolific Pablo Eguzkiza (trained at Château Petrus).

Remelluri Blanco has been the passion project of Telmo Rodríguez since his early days as a winemaker, becoming one of the most coveted and sought-after wines in all of Spain. The story goes that, in the early 1990s, Telmo’s father Jaime would never let him experiment with the red wines of Remelluri because the risk of failure was too great to make substantial changes. Instead, Telmo was given free rein to create a white expression of the Remelluri farm. He was inspired by his time spent learning winemaking in France with Gérard Chave in Hermitage, Clape in Cornas, and Château de Beaucastel in the southern Rhône. There, Telmo learned to make what he refers to as “human-scale wines” that spoke of people and place—wines with soul. That was exactly the type of terroir-driven white wine he set out to make in Remelluri’s high-altitude vineyards on the mountainside, overlooking the Ebro river valley, Rioja sprawling out below in every direction.

The concept of Remelluri Blanco remains the obsolescence of grape variety through the co-planting of different vines, ensuring the wine speaks only of the terruño of the place rather than of any particular grape or process. With Remelluri Blanco, Telmo has achieved something truly unique and singular, with each vintage coveted by the same collectors who search out Chave’s Hermitage Blanc and Montrachet by Domaine Leflaive. Remelluri Blanco illuminates a path forward for world-class, place-based white Rioja wines capable of improving in bottle, defying the notion that only the red wines deserve the world’s attention or respect. As with all of the wines of Remelluri, the white wine handsomely repays extended cellar aging and patience, and is produced in very small quantities, offered only to the best clients of Remelluri.