Wine & Architecture
The Titanium Wave Over Elciego: Gehry's Winery Hotel and the Red Inland of Rioja Alavesa
In 2006, Frank Gehry raised a ribbon of pink, gold and silver titanium above an 1858 cellar in Elciego — 61 rooms, two hours inland from the Basque coast. This is Euskadi's second wine story: the Tempranillo reds of Rioja Alavesa, not the Atlantic txakoli of the shore, framed by walled medieval wine towns. Gehry, who died in December 2025, left here an inland counterweight to the sea — architecture you drink by the glass.
Mondmodel Intelligence ·
The Titanium Ribbon at Elciego
Hotel Marqués de Riscal, a Luxury Collection Hotel, opened in 2006 with 61 rooms in the village of Elciego, in Rioja Alavesa, Álava province. Frank Gehry let a ribbon of pink, gold and silver titanium unfurl above a cellar founded in 1858 — one of Rioja's oldest — so that the new rises straight out of the old. The colours are not arbitrary: pink for the wine, gold for the label's mesh, silver for the bottle's foil. The house restaurant, holding one Michelin star, sits beneath the same folded roof and serves Riojan cooking with the vineyards in the window. It is a work of architecture you stay inside, not merely look at.
Ask for a room in the titanium-clad wing rather than the annexe; the former are the ones Gehry himself shaped, with the irregular windows facing the village church tower.
Two Wine Stories, Not One
Euskadi has two distinct wine stories, and they should never be merged. On the coast, txakoli is grown: a high-acid, lightly sparkling Atlantic white, gathered under three appellations — Getariako Txakolina, Bizkaiko Txakolina and Arabako Txakolina. Inland, in Álava, lies Rioja Alavesa with its Tempranillo reds, a sub-zone of Rioja DOCa. These are two different wines from two different zones: one poured from a height to aerate, the other aged long in oak. This guide is about the inland, red Euskadi — not the white of the shore. To conflate them is to miss the very point of the region.
If you want to taste both on one trip, drink the txakoli on the coast as an aperitif and save the Tempranillo for Rioja Alavesa — they belong to different meals, not the same table.
The Architecture Trail of the Walled Wine Towns
Rioja Alavesa is framed by walled medieval wine towns — Laguardia and Elciego — their lanes undermined by old cellars dug for fermentation. Twenty minutes from Gehry's titanium stands a second signature work: Ysios, designed by Santiago Calatrava and inaugurated in 2001 just outside Laguardia. Its aluminium roof runs in a long wave that echoes the Sierra de Cantabria range behind it — a cellar that redraws its own horizon. Two architects, two generations, the same gesture: letting the building answer the landscape rather than defy it. To walk between them is to read Rioja Alavesa as a gallery in which each room is a winery.
Book a tour of Ysios (Camino de la Hoya 1, Laguardia) at least a week ahead — visits are scheduled and the winery does not take walk-in groups.
The Inland Counterweight
Rioja Alavesa lies roughly two hours inland from the Basque coast — administratively Basque, in Álava province, but not coastal-adjacent. It is worth saying plainly, because the region is so often wrongly bundled with the sea: there is no beach here, no txakoli, no pintxo round along a harbour. Instead there is the Tempranillo and the monumental cellars. Gehry died in December 2025, so his titanium wave is now read in retrospect — a last inland gesture from the architect who drew the Guggenheim on Bilbao's river. Between coast and inland runs the whole span of Euskadi: the sea's white wine and pintxo against the foothills' red and the waves of Calatrava and Gehry. It is one region — only at two distances from the Atlantic.
Treat Rioja Alavesa as its own overnight, not a day trip from San Sebastián — two hours each way makes it a journey in itself, and the titanium wing is finest in evening light.