Luxury holidays in La Rioja

What's better than a loveable underdog? Well, a wine-producing underdog, of course. Encased by the Cantabria mountains and crumbling mediaeval walls, the historic region of La Rioja may be Spain’s smallest, but it packs quite the punch – dense and full-bodied, just like its namesake. And like all good underdogs, it revels in contradiction; bottle green hills roll into dry lunar landscapes and futuristic buildings, like transplanted spacecrafts, rise up from otherwise sleepy, sunbaked villages. In fact, the latter has become somewhat of a regional trademark, while the world has been cooling off in Champagne, and popping Prosecco in Veneto, La Rioja has been raising the stakes by combining wine and design with some of the world's most architecturally innovative bodegas. Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Philippe Mazierre have all left their mark in the region, enhancing the flavours of this rustic land with a catalogue of razor-sharp contemporary feats. Nevertheless, the classics persist; there’s the birthplace of modern Spanish in an 11th-century monastery, a cathedral so grandiose it inspired its own terminology (‘decadent gothic’, you get the picture), and plenty of glass swirling, naturally, all paired with plate-loads of pleasantly provincial pinchos.