I was born and raised in the Basque region, in northern Spain, where wine is part of daily life. Wine, for me, comes from two directions. My parents are from Ribera del Duero, where my family still owns vineyards that are 120 years old. As a kid, I learned about the Basque white Txakoli wine from my uncles, and on visits south, about my family’s own Ribera del Duero vines.

I moved to Minnesota and spent 14 years as a Spanish immersion school teacher, in Forest Lake and then Edina. I loved my job. Year after year, I became friends with the parents of my students, which evolved into a network of wonderful people that I now call family here, since my Spaniards are far away. Only my wife and my 5-year-old proud Minnesotan live here with me. Everyone wonders why I live here when Spain has such a wonderful climate. What kept me is the values Minnesotans carry, the smiles that greet you even from strangers, and a kind of care that doesn’t need an audience to be real.

The tastings started almost by accident. At the charter school where I taught in Edina, parents bid on experiences at the school auction to raise money for the school. One year I donated a wine tasting as an auction item. Three of them sold, at a high enough price that I started taking the whole thing seriously. Teaching, it turns out, gave me some tips that make my tasting presentations engaging. I share stories from my own childhood and my family’s history with wine, keeping the format simple rather than technical. That’s the seed VinoMN grew out of. Along the way I also finished a PhD in Sport Science, which I never used professionally. But now, in a roundabout way: these days I joke it makes me your “Spain wine doctor.”

I go back to Spain every summer, and over the years American friends started visiting, and I’d show them around. The more of them I hosted, the more I steered them away from the obvious stops and toward small medieval towns in the northern regions, full of castles, wineries and amazing food — the towns I grew up around and know well. Those regions barely see American tourists, and there were almost no tours built around them. That gap is where VinoMN’s Spain trips came from. Quick tip: if you travel to Spain, the best months are April–May and September–November, still warm and not crowded.

Reading a Spanish wine label without panicking

The single most useful thing you can learn is what the aging terms mean. Spain, unlike France, Italy or the U.S., actually regulates this vocabulary.

• Joven means young: little to no oak aging, meant to be drunk within a year or two.
• Crianza requires at least two years of aging, with a stretch in oak (about 12 months). The sweet spot for everyday drinking — enough structure to be interesting, still affordable.
• Reserva means three years minimum, with at least two in oak.
• Gran Reserva is the big one: five years minimum, at least three in oak. A good Gran Reserva can be remarkably alive after fifteen or twenty years.

None of this means “better” in a simple sense. A great Joven from a serious producer can outclass a mediocre Reserva.

The other tip I give people constantly: look past Rioja, wonderful as it is, and try a Ribera del Duero, made mostly from Tempranillo grown at high altitude along the Duero. The altitude means cooler nights, more acidity and structure. This one is personal for me: it’s where my family is from, and where my parents still keep that 120-year-old vineyard. If Rioja is Spain’s most famous wine abroad, Ribera del Duero is often its most requested in my country.

Wine trends in Spain

There’s a shift happening in Spain right now that I think is genuinely interesting, and it’s worth knowing about if you only learned Rioja through Reserva and Gran Reserva. A lot of younger winemakers are moving away from heavy, long-oaked styles and toward wines labeled Roble — meaning “oak,” but used loosely for wines aged only 3–6 months in barrel. The result is fresher, more fruit-forward, less oak-dominated wine, and honestly, it’s often what the grape actually tastes like before three generations of tradition tell you how it’s “supposed” to taste.

Alongside that, there’s a real push toward natural and low-intervention wine, featuring minimal or no added sulfites, native yeasts instead of lab-cultured ones, organic or biodynamic farming, and less filtering. Some of it comes out of genuine environmental concern, and some of it is a reaction against decades of Spain being known mostly for big, oaky, crowd-pleasing reds. In my experience, these wines tend to be much gentler the next morning.

I don’t think either style replaces the other. But if you want to taste where Spanish wine is actually heading, ask a shop for something Roble, or something natural, and see what shows up. It might not be what you expect from a Spanish red, and that’s kind of the point.

Why the village matters more than the vineyard

Here’s my top wine travel tip: the wine really is the place. Drive twenty minutes outside Haro (the town where wine started in Spain) and the soil changes from limestone to alluvial, and I promise you can taste it in the glass. And the people making that wine? A lot of them are doing exactly what their great-grandparents did, in the same building, with the same hands-on stubbornness. Talk to the person who actually made the bottle you’re drinking; you’ll learn more about Spain in an afternoon that way than you will checking cities off a list.

Honestly, if you’re building a trip to Spain around wine, my one piece of advice is: don’t try to hit every big city. Slow down, go small. Good wine, done right, is really just an excuse to sit still somewhere long enough to actually notice it.

Roberto Izquierdo was born and raised in the Basque Country, Spain. He is the founder of VinoMN, which hosts Spanish wine tastings and paella workshops across the Twin Cities and leads small-group tours to Spain’s wine regions. Learn more at vinomn.com.