I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business.

I'm Levy Dalton.

I'm Erin Scala and here's our show today. Oh, Rioja is one of those magical wine regions where the more you scratch the more

interesting things you on earth.

Its history and culture is multifaceted and layered.

And despite rigid DOC laws, there are many ways of producing wine in Rioja

that yield a wide spectrum of varieties and styles.

As in many European wine areas, the first wine in Rioja was probably made by Phoenicians,

and definitely by Romans, who established wine as a major product in the area.

By the 1200s Rioha wines were being exported and in the mid-15 hundreds quality laws were put into place that made it illegal to blend outside wines

into Rioha wines. Also, Rioha wines had to be shipped in sealed boa bags, stamped

with an indicator of origin. Around this time Rioja got a lot of

foot traffic in the form of pilgrims who were on El Camino to Santiago in

Galicia. The pilgrims would pass through Ryoja and bring home with

them a respect for the wines of the region. Ryoha wine in a form that resembles something

we'd recognize today,

dates to the late 1700s when Manuel Quintano

began to age wine in large wooden barrels.

Marquez de Marietta and Marquez de Riscal were using oak in the mid-19th century

and the former was producing on a large level and exporting to the colonies.

Today, oak-aging is written right into the regulations, and it's pretty much the status quo that your best grapes will go into your reserva or ground reserva, which by regulation must receive the most amount of oak aging.

But back to the 1800s,

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