The Wine Train That Built Rioja: The History of Haro’s Barrio de la Estación

Before Rioja became one of the world's great wine regions, it was a remote corner of northern Spain with vineyards, wine, and a transportation problem. Then, in the 1860s, two things happened almost simultaneously: Bordeaux's vineyards began to suffer devastating disease, and the railway arrived in Haro.

The French needed wine. Rioja had it. And for the first time, Rioja had a fast way to move it. What followed would transform the region forever.

Before the Railway

Rioja was already a wine region long before the first train arrived in Haro.

Wine had been produced and traded in the region for centuries, and by the 19th century Rioja Alta had developed a strong viticultural identity. Haro itself had an established network of underground cellars and small producers; by 1864, the town's Calle de las Cuevas alone was home to 27 documented wine caves. The problem was not making wine. It was moving it.

Wine traveled by road, largely by horse-drawn carts and mule transport. The roads north toward the Basque Country and its ports were difficult and expensive, limiting how much wine could be moved and how far it could travel profitably. Rioja had the vineyards and the wine, but not yet the infrastructure to turn that production into a major export industry. Then the railway arrived. And the timing could hardly have been more consequential.

1863–1870: The Foundations of Modern Rioja

Some years leave their mark on wine history. Others change its course entirely. 1863 was one of those years.

In Bordeaux, the vineyards were beginning to suffer from oidium, a devastating disease that was already putting serious pressure on French wine production. At almost exactly the same moment, the railway arrived in Haro. One development created an urgent need for wine, while the other gave Rioja an entirely new way to move it. The timing was extraordinary. Rioja already had vineyards, wine, and a long tradition of production, but it was about to gain something it had never possessed on this scale: direct access to distant markets.

Before the railway, Rioja's wine moved largely by horse-drawn cart and mule. Transport was slow, expensive, and limited the distance wine could travel profitably. The arrival of the railway changed those economics almost overnight. Wine could now be brought toward Haro, loaded for the journey north, and connected with the markets and ports of the Basque Country and beyond. A region that had long produced wine suddenly had a much more efficient way to sell it outside its own borders.

And the timing could hardly have been more important. Oidium was already damaging French vineyards in 1863, and from 1867, phylloxera would begin creating an even greater crisis. French wine merchants were facing shortages and needed new sources of supply. Rioja was geographically close, already producing wine, and now had a railway connecting it to the outside world. The opportunity was difficult to ignore.

French merchants began coming to Rioja to buy wine. At first, this was not the international Rioja of famous estates, historic labels, and age-worthy Gran Reservas that we know today. Much of the trade was commercial. Wine purchased from local producers could be gathered, stored, prepared, and shipped north through merchant warehouses and cellars. Rioja was becoming a source of wine for a French market desperately looking to replace production lost to disease.

But the significance of the French arrival went far beyond the immediate sale of wine. They brought capital, commercial experience, technical knowledge, new approaches to winemaking and aging, and access to established international markets. Rioja already possessed the vineyards, the wine, the land, and generations of local knowledge. The railway now connected those resources to a much larger commercial world.

This began to change the way Rioja's producers thought about wine itself. The opportunity was no longer simply to grow grapes and make wine for nearby consumption. Wine could be selected, handled more carefully, aged, stored, transported, and sold for greater value. Quality and longevity could become part of the business. The wine could be treated as something worth developing rather than simply something to move.

The influence coming from France was important, but Rioja did not simply become a copy of Bordeaux. Local producers adapted outside ideas to Rioja's own grapes, vineyards, climate, traditions, and commercial realities. What emerged was something new: a regional wine industry increasingly capable of controlling not only the production of wine, but also its aging, presentation, and journey into the wider world.

France came to Rioja because it needed wine. Rioja had the wine, and now it had the railway to move it.

By 1870, the foundations of modern Rioja were in place. The great transformation of Haro was still to come, but the forces that would drive it had already arrived: international demand, French influence, commercial investment, and the railway.

1870s–1900: Haro’s Barrio de la Estación Explodes

By the 1870s, the area around Haro’s railway station was becoming something entirely new. What had once been the edge of town was developing into a dense commercial and industrial district, with wineries, warehouses, cellars, workers, carts, barrels, and railway wagons concentrated around the tracks.

The wineries that define the Barrio de la Estación today began taking shape during this period. López de Heredia was established in 1877, CVNE in 1879, Gómez Cruzado in 1886, La Rioja Alta in 1890, and Bodegas Bilbaínas in 1901.

The activity around the station was substantial. Wine arrived from the surrounding vineyards in bocoyes and barricas, moving by cart into the cellars and warehouses. Workers handled, stored, and prepared the wine before it continued north by rail. The station became a place of constant movement, where the agricultural world of Rioja met the commercial world beyond it.

Wine was not the district's only industry. Eau-de-vie, soap, and fertilizer factories also operated nearby, while vineyards still occupied parts of the surrounding landscape. But wine increasingly defined the character of the neighborhood. The concentration of wineries around the tracks created a remarkable ecosystem in which production, aging, storage, commerce, and transportation all existed side by side.

By the turn of the century, the transformation was unmistakable. Haro had become a wine town built around a railway station, and the Barrio de la Estación had become the physical heart of Rioja's emerging wine industry.

This was the beginning of the great wine train era.

La Cata del Barrio de la Estación

Walk through Haro's Barrio de la Estación today and you'll find something remarkable: a small cluster of historic wineries gathered around the old railway station, many of them founded during the extraordinary transformation of Rioja in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Together, they form one of the most concentrated collections of historic wine houses anywhere in Spain.

The group is often associated with the seven historic wineries of Haro's railway district, each with its own story, style, and generations of Rioja tradition. But they share something deeper: they are the surviving architecture of the revolution that began when French demand and the railway collided in Haro.

Now let's meet the houses that helped build it.

1877: López de Heredia

In 1877, Rafael López de Heredia y Landeta established what would become one of Rioja's most enduring wine houses. From the beginning, the house embraced the patience that would become one of traditional Rioja's defining characteristics. Vineyards, cellars, and long-aging practices developed over generations, eventually producing wines such as Viña Tondonia that became synonymous with old-school Rioja. López de Heredia helped establish the idea that Rioja could be more than a source of wine for foreign merchants. It could become a producer of distinctive, age-worthy wines in its own right.

1879: CVNE

Two years later, Eusebio and Raimundo Real de Asúa founded the Compañía Vinícola del Norte de España, better known as CVNE. The brothers established their winery in Haro's Barrio de la Estación, placing the young company directly at the center of the railway and wine trade that was transforming the town.

CVNE quickly developed ambitions that extended well beyond the local market. The company embraced careful winemaking, extended aging, and international commerce, helping establish Rioja as a serious fine-wine region rather than simply a source of inexpensive wine. Its later creation of Imperial, one of Rioja's most iconic wines, would become a defining expression of that philosophy. But the important moment was 1879, when CVNE joined the generation of houses that would shape Rioja's future.

1886: Gómez Cruzado

In 1886, Ángel Gómez de Arteche established a winery in Haro, further strengthening the concentration of producers around the railway station. The winery eventually became Gómez Cruzado, and its continued presence in the Barrio de la Estación makes it one of the surviving links to this formative period. Its story represents the transition taking place throughout Haro: Rioja was moving away from being simply a supplier of wine and toward becoming a region of recognizable producers with their own cellars, identities, and long-term ambitions.

1890: La Rioja Alta

By 1890, the transformation of Haro was impossible to miss. Five families from Rioja and the Basque Country came together to establish La Rioja Alta, with the ambition of producing wines of serious quality and longevity. From the beginning, the house embraced the techniques and traditions that had been introduced during the French influence while adapting them to Rioja's own vineyards and identity. The result was a philosophy centered on oak aging, bottle maturation, and patience. Its first wine, the Reserva 1890, established a tradition that continues in the house's Gran Reserva wines today. 

1901: Bodegas Bilbaínas

By 1901, Haro had become a genuine wine center, and Bodegas Bilbaínas joined the remarkable group of producers surrounding the railway station. Founded by Santiago de Ugarte, the winery built upon an infrastructure and commercial ecosystem that had been developing for nearly forty years. Its later Viña Pomal became one of Rioja's classic names, but its place in this story goes back to the moment when Haro had evolved from a railway-connected wine town into one of Spain's great wine capitals.

The 20th Century: From Rail to Road

The railway did not suddenly disappear from Rioja. For decades, it remained an important part of the region's wine trade, and Haro's station continued to serve the wineries clustered around the Barrio de la Estación. But the world that had made the railway so central was gradually changing. Roads improved, trucks became more efficient, and wine could increasingly travel directly from winery to customer without passing through a railway station.

The great wine railroads of Rioja therefore faded gradually rather than ending on a single day. The old Castejón to Bilbao railway continued operating, even as its importance to the wine trade diminished. What disappeared was the particular system that had made Haro's station such a remarkable center of wine commerce: barrels and bottles arriving at the station, being loaded onto railway wagons, and heading north toward markets that had once seemed remarkably distant.

Other railways connected different parts of Rioja as well. The Haro to Ezcaray line opened in 1916 and remained in operation until 1964, while the Calahorra to Arnedillo railway continued until 1966. By then, however, road transport was increasingly becoming the practical choice for the wine industry.

The change was more than technological. It marked the end of an era in which the railway had shaped where wineries were built, where wine was stored, and how it reached the outside world. The Barrio de la Estación remained, but its original purpose was beginning to change.

And yet the old railway legacy never completely disappeared. The wineries were still there, the cellars were still aging wine, and the buildings that had once been surrounded by carts and railway wagons remained part of Rioja's landscape.

The wine no longer needed the train to reach the world.

The End of the Traditional Wine-Export World

By the middle of the 20th century, the wine trade that had once defined Haro's railway station was becoming a relic of another era. Trucks offered wineries greater flexibility than railway wagons, allowing wine to move directly from the cellar to the customer without depending on fixed routes, loading schedules, or station infrastructure. The railway remained, but its role in the wine business steadily diminished.

What was disappearing was not Rioja's wine trade, but the particular way that trade had been organized for generations. The barrels, carts, railway wagons, warehouses, and merchant cellars that had once made the Barrio de la Estación a center of international commerce were gradually replaced by modern transportation and distribution.

Yet the physical legacy survived. The wineries that had grown up around the railway remained, and the Barrio de la Estación continued to be one of the defining wine districts of Rioja. New generations of producers would eventually join the historic houses, adapting the neighborhood to a modern wine industry without erasing what came before.

Muga, founded in 1932, moved its headquarters from central Haro to the Barrio de la Estación in 1970. A decade later, Roda established its facilities there as well. Their arrival was a reminder that the district was not simply a monument to Rioja's past. It was still a living center of wine production.

The railway had changed Rioja once before, by giving the region access to the outside world. Now its importance was fading as transportation evolved. But the industry it helped create had become too deeply rooted to disappear with it.

The Legacy: From Railway Wagons to Library Bottles

Walk through Haro's Barrio de la Estación today and it can be difficult to imagine the noise and movement that once surrounded these cellars. The railway is no longer the force driving Rioja's wine trade, and modern transportation has replaced the old procession of carts, casks, and railway wagons. But the legacy of that era remains in the wineries themselves, in the cellars beneath them, and in the wines that were made to survive long after the trains stopped carrying them.

The great Rioja houses that emerged during the railway era helped establish a philosophy that still defines the region's most traditional wines. Wine was not necessarily made to be consumed immediately. It could be given years in oak, followed by years in bottle, allowing fruit, acidity, tannin, and oak to slowly become something more complex. Patience became part of the product.

That philosophy is what makes an old Rioja bottle so fascinating today. A 1964, 1968, 1970, 1981, 1985, 1986, or 1994 vintage is not simply an old bottle of wine. It is the surviving result of a system that began taking shape when Rioja first became connected to the outside world.

The railway changed how Rioja moved. French demand changed the economics of the region. The great bodegas changed how the wine was made, aged, and presented to the world. And then time did the rest.

Today, we open these bottles in a world of refrigerated trucks, global shipping, instant communication, and modern logistics. Yet inside the bottle is something much older. The leather, tobacco, dried fruit, cedar, earth, and spice that emerge from a properly aged Rioja are the result of decades of patience, built on traditions that took shape more than a century ago.

That is the remarkable thing about Rioja's railway story. The trains were built to move wine into the future. More than a century later, the wines they helped make possible are still carrying that history forward.