By the mid-1980s, Garnacha covered roughly 82% of Navarra’s registered vineyard, the backbone of the region’s wine industry since long before anyone called it Denominación de Origen Navarra. That same decade, the region’s own public research institute, the Estación de Viticultura y Enología de Navarra (EVENA), studied the vineyard and recommended cutting Garnacha’s share nearly in half, down to 35%, while nearly quadrupling Tempranillo’s footprint and introducing Cabernet Sauvignon from scratch. Navarra did not just hit that target. It went past it. Garnacha now sits at roughly a quarter of the region’s registered vineyard, lower than even the reduced share the 1986 plan called for.
Most descriptions of Navarra wine treat Garnacha as a simple, comfortable fact: the grape behind the region’s well known rosados, present because the climate happens to suit it. That framing skips the deliberate decision Navarra made to move away from Garnacha on the advice of its own experts, and skips just as quickly past the fact that the decision worked better than planned, to the point of nearly erasing the variety that had given the region its identity in the first place. Understanding Navarra wine today, including why a specific, named group of producers has spent the better part of three decades hunting down old Garnacha vines and cataloguing thousands of individual vine samples to save them, means knowing about the plan to get rid of it first.
This account draws on DO Navarra’s own published history, the Gran Enciclopedia de Navarra’s institutional record of the region’s wine designations, and independent wine trade reporting that names the specific researchers, the specific 1986 study, and the specific producers behind Garnacha’s recovery, cross checked against each other rather than repeated from a single retelling.
A Grape Documented in Navarra Since 1746, Long Before It Needed Saving
The earliest documented references to Garnacha in Navarra go back further than most regional wine histories bother to state precisely. A 1746 record shows the donation of a vineyard planted with Garnacha in Obanos, a village near Puente la Reina. A second early reference, from 1767, describes a vineyard “planted with good Garnacha vines” in Pamplona itself. In nearby Viana, a town historically tied to Navarra though now part of DOCa Rioja, a 1744 record shows a bodega deliberately setting its Garnacha casks apart from the rest of its stock, evidence the variety already carried its own identity within a winery’s cellar more than 280 years ago.
Garnacha held a steady but unremarkable presence through the 17th and 18th centuries. What changed its standing was a disaster elsewhere in the vineyard. Navarra’s vines were devastated by phylloxera in the 19th century, a crisis that reduced the region’s cultivated area from around 50,000 hectares to barely 1,500 before recovery began, driven by the regional government’s push toward resistant varieties. Garnacha’s particular resistance to powdery mildew, a separate disease that plagued replanted vineyards across Europe in this period, made it one of the varieties growers leaned on hardest as Navarra rebuilt. By the end of the 19th century, Garnacha was no longer just one grape among several. It was the grape Navarra had rebuilt itself around.
How One Grape Became a Denominación de Origen
Navarra’s wine designation has a more layered founding story than the flattened “founded in 1933” version repeated across most general wine writing. An order creating the Denominación de Origen was published in the Gaceta de Madrid by Spain’s Ministry of Agriculture in November 1933, but the Spanish Civil War interrupted its development, and the DO Navarra recognized today was not formally and operationally constituted until June 30, 1958, under its first president, Antonio Mauleón Aroza. Its first formal regulation, in force until 1978, split the region into four subzones. A second regulation, adopted under president Francisco Traver Campo, redrew the map into the five subzones that exist today, adding Tierra Estella to Valdizarbe, Baja Montaña, Ribera Alta, and Ribera Baja.
Garnacha was not incidental to any of this. It was the reason the DO existed in the first place. Even before formal constitution, Navarra had already built its regional identity around rosado, made overwhelmingly from Garnacha Tinta using the traditional sangrado method, in which juice is bled off red grape skins early to produce a pink wine with more structure than a typical rosé. Under that model, red wine from Garnacha was treated almost as a secondary product. Winemaker Pilar García Granero, a former president of DO Navarra, has described the era plainly: doble pasta reds, made with extra skin contact specifically to free up more pink juice for rosado, meant that red wine was “almost a by-product,” since rosado juice fetched roughly double the price of red. Navarra’s founding wine identity, in other words, was not built on Garnacha as a red wine grape. It was built on Garnacha as a rosado machine.
The 1986 Study That Tried to Cut Garnacha to a Third
The push away from Garnacha did not happen all at once. EVENA’s first documented intervention came in 1975, when the institute encouraged growers to plant more Tempranillo and white varieties specifically “to balance wine production,” according to longtime EVENA technician José Félix Cibriain. A second wave followed in the 1980s, arriving, in Cibriain’s own account, “in the wake of the success of Magaña’s wines and those of other local producers.” That plan promoted converting vineyards from traditional goblet, or bush vine, training to trellis systems, and introduced Chardonnay as Navarra’s benchmark white grape alongside Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot for reds. The white side of that same push, including the research institute behind it and the vintage that put Navarra ahead of Rioja on that grape, is covered in Encierro’s account of Navarra’s Chardonnay history.
The plan reached its sharpest, most quantified form in 1986. An EVENA study from that year, later published in agronomist Jorge Sauleda’s 1988 book on Navarra’s vineyards, wineries, and wines, recommended cutting Garnacha’s share of Navarra’s registered vineyard from 82% down to 35%, while raising Tempranillo from 7.5% to 31% and introducing Cabernet Sauvignon up to 16%. García Granero, presenting this history publicly at the Grenaches du Monde competition held in Olite, summed up the thinking behind it in one line: Navarra’s planners “took the Californian model instead of looking to the Rhône,” reaching for Bordeaux and Burgundy varieties instead of doubling down on the same grape that had made Châteauneuf-du-Pape and other Rhône reds famous.
What actually happened outran the plan. Navarra’s registered Garnacha area fell from 12,582 hectares in 1990, more than 70% of the region’s vineyard at the time, to 6,200 hectares by 2000, a halving in a single decade, and down again to roughly 3,043 hectares the decade after that. Today, Garnacha sits at approximately 2,600 hectares, about 25% to 26% of Navarra’s registered vineyard, below even the 35% floor the 1986 study had called for. Tempranillo now covers roughly 30%, and Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot around 12% each. The decline is not even across the region. Garnacha remains dominant in its historical stronghold of Baja Montaña, at roughly 55% of that subzone’s plantings, but has fallen to as little as 9% in Tierra Estella.
Old Vines, a Vine Bank, and the Producers Betting on Garnacha Again
What survived the cut turned out to be worth protecting. Of the 256 hectares of vines over 50 years old currently registered with Navarra’s Regulatory Council, 232 hectares, roughly 91% of all the region’s oldest vineyard stock, are Garnacha. Farming vines that old is expensive and increasingly rare. Roberto Aguirre, who owns 30 hectares of Garnacha plots more than 40 years old near the Aragon border, has put the economics of it bluntly: “hardly anyone is willing to pay the cost of farming an old vineyard.”
Navarra answered that problem with an organized recovery effort rather than leaving it to chance. Between 2008 and 2009, a partnership between the Universidad Pública de Navarra and the Vitis Navarra nursery ran a project to build a germplasm bank of local grape varieties, surveying vineyards over 40 years old across the region, deliberately including neglected plots, and taking cuttings from more than 400 individual vineyards. More than 4,000 Garnacha biotypes were eventually grafted and catalogued with full traceability. Of those, 2,025 virus free biotypes now form the working basis of the Vitis Navarra research collection, and 700 top performing biotypes were selected as the foundation for a new set of clones now being made available to growers who want to replant old Garnacha with confidence in what they are putting in the ground.
A specific, named generation of producers built their reputations on exactly this variety while the EVENA-backed plan was still trying to shrink it. Artazu, the Navarra project of Rioja producer Artadi, settled in the Valdizarbe subzone in 1996 at the request of an American importer looking for a serious Spanish Garnacha. Nekeas, also in Valdizarbe, released its old vine Garnacha, El Chaparral de Vega Sindoa, with the 1997 vintage, again at a US importer’s request. Domaines Lupier, founded in 2008 in the Baja Montaña village of San Martín de Unx, built its entire identity around old Garnacha vines, the majority of them dating to 1903. Viña Zorzal, based in Corella in the Ribera Baja subzone, farms 25 of its 52 hectares as traditional Garnacha bush vines and has since expanded north into Baja Montaña to work with growers preserving old vines in villages like Lerga. Longer established houses such as Chivite, Marco Real, and Bodegas Ochoa, whose relationship with Garnacha had historically been confined to rosado, have added serious Garnacha red bottlings of their own as the variety’s reputation recovered. A newer wave, including winemaker Gonzalo Celayeta and his Kimera project with Luis Moya, Aseginolaza & Leunda, and Josu Amatria, continues that work today. Viña Zorzal’s own winery and Navarra’s Denominación de Origen both list Garnacha as the variety that ties the region’s five subzones together, a description that would have made little sense in 1986.
What Actually Ends Up in the Glass in Pamplona
None of this history is abstract for anyone drinking their way through Pamplona’s bars during Sanfermines. DO Navarra describes itself as the origin point of rosé wine in Spain and its acknowledged market leader in the category, and the rosado most visitors are handed across a bar during fiesta week is still, overwhelmingly, Garnacha made by the same sangrado method the region built its name on generations ago. It is a different drink entirely from the red wine and cola mix served at peña gatherings, and ordering a glass of Navarra rosado in a Casco Viejo bar is a more direct connection to the region’s actual wine history than most visitors realize. Encierro’s own account of how Navarra invented Spanish rosé covers that side of the Garnacha story in full. Garnacha reds, once treated as a by-product of rosado production, are increasingly showing up on the same wine lists too, evidence of a recovery that took thirty years of deliberate work to arrive at a bar table.
FAQ
What is Garnacha wine from Navarra?
Garnacha, known internationally as Grenache, is a red grape documented in Navarra since at least 1746 and historically the region’s dominant variety. It has been used above all to make rosado, DO Navarra’s signature wine style, through a bleeding method called sangrado. Garnacha remains DO Navarra’s most planted red grape today, at roughly a quarter of the region’s registered vineyard, even after falling from more than 70% of plantings as recently as 1990.
Why did Navarra try to reduce Garnacha plantings?
A 1986 study by Navarra’s public viticulture institute, EVENA, recommended cutting Garnacha’s vineyard share from 82% to 35% and expanding Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot instead, building on an earlier push through the 1970s and 1980s toward higher value red wine production and international grape varieties. The goal was to modernize Navarra’s wine industry beyond its reliance on bulk rosado production. The reduction went further than planned: Garnacha now sits at roughly 25% to 26% of the region’s vineyard, below the 35% floor the study called for.
Is Garnacha the same grape as Grenache?
Yes. Garnacha is the Spanish name for the same red grape known as Grenache in France and internationally, and Garnacha Tinta is the specific red skinned variant grown throughout Navarra. It is one of the most widely planted red grapes in the world, and Navarra is one of the regions where its documented history runs deepest, with written references dating back to the 1740s.
Where can I try old vine Garnacha from Navarra?
Producers built specifically around old vine Navarra Garnacha include Domaines Lupier in San Martín de Unx, where most vines date to 1903, and Viña Zorzal in Corella, which farms old bush vine Garnacha alongside newer plantings and has expanded into the Baja Montaña subzone. Longer established houses such as Chivite, Marco Real, and Ochoa, historically known for Garnacha rosado, have also added Garnacha red bottlings as the variety’s reputation has recovered. DO Navarra’s own winery directory lists current producers by subzone for visitors planning tastings.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.