López de Heredia, the Haro winery founded in 1877, has spent nearly a century and a half refusing to modernize. It still ferments wine in oak vats older than its own oldest living employee, fines every barrel by hand with egg whites, bottles without filtration, and ages its whites longer than almost any other white wine style on earth. And on the same grounds, it hired Zaha Hadid, one of the most radical architects of the last fifty years, to design a building shaped like a distorted decanter.
That pairing looks like a contradiction until you know what the building is actually for. Most coverage treats it as one or the other: architecture writers describe the Hadid pavilion as a striking, freestanding sculpture and move on, wine writers describe the winery’s century-old vats and untouched methods and mention the pavilion, if at all, as a strange footnote. Almost nothing explains that the pavilion exists to protect a single wooden retail kiosk the winery’s founder built for the 1910 Brussels World’s Fair, an object that sat disassembled and forgotten in an outhouse for most of the twentieth century before anyone thought to save it. The building is not a departure from López de Heredia’s traditionalism. It is that traditionalism, applied to architecture instead of wine.
This account draws on the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja’s own winery profile, Zaha Hadid Architects’ primary project record of the commission, and cross-verified reporting from Wine-Searcher, ArchDaily, and Basque regional press, rather than any single source’s version of the story.
A Winery Built by a Chilean Who Never Saw Rioja Coming
López de Heredia exists because of a plant disease on the other side of a mountain range. In the 1860s and 1870s, phylloxera devastated the vineyards of Bordeaux, and French wine merchants crossed into northern Spain looking for grapes to replace what they had lost. Rafael López de Heredia y Landeta was not one of those Frenchmen. He was born in Santiago, Chile, to parents of Basque origin, sent to Spain at fourteen to study with Jesuits, and later worked as a wine merchant before the opportunity those French buyers created pulled him toward a small, then unremarkable town called Haro.
He founded his bodega there in 1877. According to the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja, the body that certifies every winery in the appellation, it is the oldest winery in Haro and one of the first three founded in the entire Rioja region. Don Rafael built it to resemble the great châteaux he had studied in Bordeaux, and in 1892 added a watchtower to the complex, nicknamed Txori Toki, Basque for birdhouse, from which he could watch both his vineyards and the weather rolling in. It still stands, and its image still appears on the winery’s labels.
Four generations later, the winery is run in large part by two of Don Rafael’s great-granddaughters, María José and Mercedes López de Heredia. María José has been direct about why almost nothing has changed. “We continue to cultivate the vineyards and indeed make our wines following the techniques and philosophies laid down over 140 years ago,” she has said. “This has been no accident, we have taken the conscious and voluntary decision not to use modern technology in our winemaking.” That is not nostalgia marketing. It is a description of how the wine is actually made, vat by vat, barrel by barrel, with almost nothing between Don Rafael’s era and this one.
Fermenting in Vats Older Than the Winery’s Own Modern Era
Walk into the working cellars at López de Heredia and very little of what you see was built after the First World War. Fermentation happens in oak vats, some over a century old, using only indigenous yeast that arrives naturally on the grape skins rather than a cultivated strain bought from a lab. There is no mechanical temperature control. The cellars themselves sit roughly fifteen meters underground, where the earth holds a near-constant twelve degrees Celsius without any machinery doing the work.
Once fermentation finishes, the wine is racked by hand, twice a year, and fined the old way, with fresh egg whites, a technique that clarifies wine by binding to particles as it settles rather than forcing it through a filter. Nothing is filtered before bottling. The winery’s flagship Reserva spends six years in barrel; the Gran Reserva spends ten, and some of the whites continue aging in bottle in the winery’s own cellars for years after that before they are ever released for sale.
The barrels themselves are part of the story. López de Heredia is one of a small handful of wineries anywhere in the world that still builds its own barrels on site, in its own cooperage, from American oak, rather than buying finished barrels from an outside supplier. The winery’s own barrel park runs well over ten thousand casks, most of them seasoned rather than new, because María José has argued publicly that new oak has become an overused shortcut in Spanish winemaking, prized for the flavor it adds rather than the stabilizing role it was originally meant to play.
The results are wines built for patience rather than immediacy. Viña Tondonia, the winery’s most famous vineyard, was planted between 1913 and 1914 on more than a hundred hectares along the Río Ebro, and its Reserva and Gran Reserva whites, made mostly from Viura with a small share of Malvasía, are aged in barrel and bottle longer than nearly any other white wine style produced anywhere. They come out the other side deliberately far from fresh and fruity, showing notes closer to old furniture, beeswax, and honey than to citrus or green apple. That is not a flaw. It is the entire point of the style, and it is exactly what a winery this committed to its own methods should be expected to produce.
The Kiosk Nobody Remembered for Ninety Years
Long before Zaha Hadid ever visited Haro, Don Rafael commissioned a wooden retail kiosk to represent his winery at the 1910 Brussels World’s Fair, one of the great international trade exhibitions of the era, where wineries and manufacturers from across Europe competed for attention on a global stage. After the fair closed, the kiosk came home to Haro, was taken apart, and was stored away. It stayed disassembled in the winery’s outhouses for the better part of a century, unremembered by most of the family that owned it.
Around 2002, on the occasion of the winery’s 125th anniversary, the current generation of owners rediscovered the old kiosk, recognized what they had, and restored it. But a restored wooden structure from 1910 still needed protection from a century of further weather if it was going to survive another hundred years on an active winery site. Rather than quietly tuck it into a warehouse, the family commissioned Zaha Hadid Architects to design a permanent enclosure for it, a decision that turned a forgotten storage problem into one of the most photographed buildings in Spanish wine country.
That sequence, disease-driven founding, decades of untouched tradition, then a near-century of forgetting and rediscovering a single wooden object, is the part almost no English-language coverage puts together. The pavilion did not arrive because the winery wanted to look modern. It arrived because the winery, true to form, refused to let a piece of its own history simply rot.
A New Bottle for an Old Wine
According to Zaha Hadid Architects’ own project record, the commission ran from 2001 to 2006. The practice has described its own approach directly: “a new bottle for an old wine, a design to safeguard one of López De Heredia’s treasures.” The new structure was built to contain the restored 1910 kiosk the way a shipping crate protects something fragile inside it, and the two were conceived as a bridge between the winery’s past and whatever it might build next.
The pavilion was first exhibited publicly at the Alimentaria food and drink trade fair in Barcelona before being dismantled again, this time deliberately, and relocated permanently to the bodega grounds in Haro. Its distinctive silhouette, a shape that seems to twist from a simple rectangle into something closer to a poured decanter, was not originally intended as a literal wine reference. According to the architects, the resemblance emerged from the engineering of the sectional design itself, and once the team noticed it, they leaned into it rather than fighting it. Today the pavilion functions as the winery’s shop and a tasting space for visitors, sitting alongside the nineteenth-century stone cellars, the 1892 tower, and the working vats as one more layer in a complex that has never stopped adding to itself without ever throwing anything away.
López de Heredia is not the only historic Rioja winery to have commissioned a landmark architect this way. A short drive from Haro, Bodegas Ysios hired Santiago Calatrava to design its own wave-roofed winery, a similarly striking contemporary building rising out of vineyard land with centuries of winemaking history behind it. A little further afield in Elciego, Marqués de Riscal made the same bet with Frank Gehry, and a 2024 economic study has since measured how much that gamble actually paid off. Haro itself, meanwhile, is also home to the annual Batalla del Vino, the town’s wine battle festival, and to Bodegas Muga, a winery that arrived in the district decades after López de Heredia and built its own reputation on keeping its own cooperage running as well.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is López de Heredia in Rioja or Navarra?
López de Heredia sits in Haro, in La Rioja Alta, not in Navarra. It is included in Encierro’s Navarra region coverage because Haro and its wine culture sit within the broader wine landscape immediately bordering Navarra, the same wider region several other wineries covered on this site call home.
How old is López de Heredia winery?
The winery was founded in 1877 by Rafael López de Heredia y Landeta, making it, according to the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja, the oldest winery in Haro and one of the first three founded anywhere in the Rioja region.
Why does López de Heredia have a building by Zaha Hadid?
The winery commissioned Zaha Hadid Architects between 2001 and 2006 to build a permanent, protective structure around a wooden retail kiosk the winery’s founder had originally built for the 1910 Brussels World’s Fair. The kiosk had sat disassembled and forgotten in storage for decades before the family rediscovered and restored it.
Can you visit López de Heredia?
Yes. The winery offers cellar visits and tastings by appointment, in Spanish, English, and French, through its own visitor program, with its historic cellars and the Zaha Hadid pavilion both part of the experience.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.