Cordovín

The thermometer on the stone wall of Cordovín’s only bar reads 34 °C at two in the afternoon, yet the air feels lighter than it should. At 589 m above the Najerilla valley floor the village sits just high enough for a breeze to skim the plateau, carrying the scent of dry barley and the faint iron note of distant vine cuttings smouldering on a grill. Eighty-odd inhabitants, one church, no cash machine, and a name that appears on wine lists from Bermeo to Bilbao: order un Cordovín and you will be served a glass of copper-pink clarete that looks more like an English skin-contact pinot than Spanish rosado.

A village the size of a London square

Cordovín occupies the same acreage as a modest Kensington garden – you can walk from the last threshing floor on the western edge to the tractor shed on the eastern rim in four minutes. The builders knew better than to waste stone: houses are mortared rubble, clay-coloured adobe, oak beams greyed by a century of northerly wind. Nothing is restored for show; rust blooms on wrought-iron balconies, yet the timber doors still fit their frames snugly enough to keep out the cierzo that rolls down the valley in February. The effect is not picturesque so much as honest – a place that has refused the cosmetic filler applied to so many Spanish hill towns.

Pause at the sixteenth-century portico of the Iglesia de San Andrés and you will see why altitude matters. From the threshold the land drops 200 m in terraced wheat and young tempranillo, then rises again to the limestone ridge that screens Logroño thirty kilometres away. On a clear December morning the white salt pans of the Ebro glint like frost; in July the same view vibrates with heat haze and the only movement is a combine crawling through oats.

Wine without a tasting room

There is no bodega door to push, no gift shop, no chalked list of verticals. Instead, clarete is made in family sheds where concrete tanks from the 1970s share floor space with mowers and rabbit hutches. The style – half red, half white grapes co-fermented – predates Rioja’s oak obsession and survives here because locals still drink it by the litre at Sunday lunch. If you want to taste, ask inside the bar: the owner keeps a plastic cola bottle filled from her cousin’s last vintage, sells 75 cl for €4, and will rinse whatever glass was last used for café con leche. It is lighter than anything labelled Provence rosé, the colour of onion skin, and tastes faintly of strawberry stalk and white pepper. British importers have yet to discover it; you cannot buy Cordovín clarete in the UK at any price.

Tracks, not trails

The GR-160 long-distance path skirts the village, but the useful routes are the farm tracks that fan out between cereal strips. A thirty-minute stroll south-east brings you to a ruined casilla – a stone hut once used for watching threshing floors – now roofless and swallows’ territory. From here the path narrows to a single-lane earth ribbon edged with poppies and the occasional abandoned iron ploughshare. Carry on another kilometre and you reach the edge of the badlands: ochre gullies where cabañuelas (old sheep shelters) are carved into the clay. There is no signage, no Ordnance Survey grid, just the understanding that if the wheat heads are above your knee you have wandered into someone’s income.

Winter sharpens the geography. January snow rarely settles in the valley below, yet Cordovín’s streets can lie white for days, the compacted ice polished by tractor tyres into glass. When that happens the LR-404 becomes treacherous: the final four kilometres climb 200 m with two hairpins unprotected by barrier. Spring is briefer than in the Basque Country – almond blossom appears suddenly in mid-March and is gone by Easter – while May delivers the kind of luminous evening light that makes the stone glow honey without resorting to an Instagram filter.

What you will not find

There is no accommodation. The last guesthouse closed when the owner died in 2012 and her children split the rooms into flats. The nearest bed is ten minutes away by car in San Asensio where Hotel Villa de San Asensio offers thirty rooms, underground parking and a pool that looks onto its own vineyard. Cordovín itself keeps Spanish farming hours: the bar opens at seven for coffee and churros, shuts at two, reappears at six, and may close again if the proprietor’s granddaughter has a school play. Arrive at three in August expecting a cold beer and you will stand in an empty square listening to a single dog bark and the whirr of an irrigation pump.

Sunday lunchtime brings a different rhythm. Families who left for Logroño or Bilbao return for cordero al sarmiento – lamb roasted over vine cuttings – served on trestle tables in the street outside the church. Visitors are welcome provided they bring appetite rather than a notebook; try to photograph the food and you will be met with the polite but firm request “come primero, después fotos”. The wine flows from unlabelled bottles that once held sparkling water, and the bill, if it arrives at all, is scribbled on the paper tablecloth: €12 a head for three courses, coffee and as much clarete as you can pour.

Getting here, getting out

Bilbao is the sensible gateway. A morning flight from Heathrow or Gatwick lands before noon Spanish time; the hire-car queue moves quickly if you avoid the desk that hands out toy-sized hatchbacks. Take the AP-68 south, exit at Haro, follow the N-232a towards Logroño, then peel off on the LR-404 signposted Cordovín. The final stretch is single-track with passing bays; wheat lorries have right of weight and will not reverse. Allow ninety minutes door to door, longer if you stop for pinchos in Haro’s Plaza de la Paz.

Leave the same way you came. There is no bus, no Saturday market, no artisan cheese stall. What you can take away is a bottle rinsed out with tap water and filled from a relative’s tank – wrap it in a jumper, wedge it upright in the suitcase, and drink it chilled in London with anything salty. It will not taste as it did under the village plane tree, but it will remind you that Rioja can do subtle, and that somewhere on a plateau above the Ebro the combine is still turning, the wind still smells of straw, and a village the size of a city block is getting on with harvest without waiting to be discovered.