Spanish Wine Label

How to read a Spanish Wine Label

Reading a Spanish wine label is relatively simple. In reading a wine label, you want to know who produces the wine, the vintage year, where the wine is from and its level of quality. Using the photo above, the important information is:

On the front of a Spanish wine label

• Bodegas Lan – The name of the winery that produced the wine.
• Crianza – this indicates the quality level and aging length of the wine. In Rioja, it is one year in the barrel and another year in the bottle before release.
• Rioja – This is the D.O. Where the grapes come from and where the wine was produced.
• Vintage – This wine is from the 2010 harvest.
• Alcohol – In this photo, the level of alcohol is on the bottom right of the label.
• Type of Wine – In this case we know it is a red wine.

On the back of a Spanish wine label

The most important part of the back label of the wine bottle is the Denominación de Origen or D.O. stamp. In this case, the red Rioja label. This is issued by the administration of the D.O. after careful inspection at the winery. The winery receives only the exact number of these official labels as the number of bottles they have produced.

Additional information on the back label is about the bodega and the making of the wine.