The road that leads to Arínzano is like the first page of an ancient history that still preserves all its mystery. Two stone fences marked by the centuries still carry the original inscription “Señorío de Arínzano”.
Here begins the Estate that Sancho Fortuñones received in 1055 from King García Sánchez VI for saving his life and restoring him to the throne of Navarra. He in turn granted it as estates to a neighboring community of monks to dedicate it to the cultivation of wine, work that they carried out for five centuries. Like so many other great wines, Arínzano carries from its origin the double imprint of sacred time and profane land.
In his story, Arínzano tells the story of Spain: after the time of the monks, came that of the great noble families with Lope de Eulate, first adviser to the last king of Navarre, who ceded this estate to him in 1520. Starting in 1715, the Marquis Zabalegui and his successors dedicated the Property exclusively to the cultivation of the vineyard and the revelation of its terroir.
After the phylloxera crisis that ruined the vine plantations, the Chivite family entrusted Denis Dubourdieu, a renowned French oenologist and agronomist, with the replanting of the estate according to a plot-based approach to the terroir that revealed a unique and extravagant expression of Chardonnay, the Merlot and Tempranillo.
Arínzano is above all a magnificently wild and lively landscape, an oasis in an arid environment that occupies 392 hectares of which only a third is dedicated to vines. This thousand-year-old glacial valley collects a current of fresh air from the Atlantic that crosses the last massifs of the Sierra de Urbasa, to rush down the river towards the slopes of the farm.
In this vast amphitheatre, the combined energies of the Cierzo wind and the Ega river give each plot a particular inflection. Earth, stone and water give the place its power, energy and emotion.
There are no great wines without great terroirs; and only men can reveal them: each plot of the estate is worked separately by the winemaker and his team. Far from the prejudices of the past, Arínzano practices a modern, precise and sustainable oenology, dictated by intuition and experience, rather than by recipes and techniques.
In Arínzano everyone is convinced that time is the deep and last dimension of wine. Bright fruit is inconceivable without the intensity and structure of silky tannins sculpted by time and the measured imprint of essentially new French oak barrels.
The Vino de Pago denomination received in 2007, which applies to the entire estate, consecrates the search for excellence in an ancient terroir that is practiced every day. Like the discovery of the property, the tasting of the wines suggests, without fully revealing, the mystery and magic of the place and its history; its thousand years of mystery.
