Each year on a warm September day, throngs of people pack the square in front of Logroño’s city hall to kick off San Mateo, a week-long party held to honour St Matthew and celebrate the grape harvest.
Singing, dancing and jumping up and down, they’re decked out in bandanas and drinking from wineskins slung around their necks – a staple of Rioja wine culture.
What the revellers might not realise is that these wineskins are in imminent danger of extinction. One day, they might disappear, along with the last man dedicated to the craft of making them.
Last man standing
Iván Barbero is the fifth generation in his family to make botas de vino: leather wineskins that have been used in Spain since Roman times.
He’s also the last botero still working in Rioja, heir to a family tradition that began in 1830, when his ancestors took over a longstanding workshop in Calle Marqués de San Nicolás, in Logroño’s historic centre.
Iván’s father Félix moved the operation to a larger site on nearby Calle Sagasta in 1981, where he worked making wineskins until he abruptly became ill and had to retire in 2023.
Rather than let the tradition die, Iván decided to close the bricks-and-mortar store and move to a workshop on Logroño’s outskirts. ‘I do this because I want to. No one is forcing me,’ Iván explains.
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We’re speaking on the phone at six in the evening, and he tells me he’s at the workshop to get started on some orders that have come in.
He works full-time in a factory and makes wineskins in his spare time.
‘Some days I’m here for six hours; some days I’m not here at all. It depends on the time I have and what my body can do,’ he says. ‘Some days you get tendonitis in your hands or your body hurts… It used to be my father and my grandfather, too; now it’s just me, the scissors and a needle and thread. It’s all done by hand and very intense.’
Iván Barbero in his workshop
(Image credit: Credit Unknown)
Labour of love
Iván makes the wineskins from goat hide, which is cut into a characteristic teardrop shape and sewn together.
He turns the pieces inside out and treats what will be the inside with a sealant – traditionally a resin called pez, but now food-grade latex, less than half a millimetre thick.
Then he adds a plastic cap and a braided cord so the bota can be worn around the neck or over the shoulders. Iván says he can make about 20 botas a day at his best, which means he sometimes turns down large orders.
‘The money I make from the botas varies from month to month, but I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the pleasure of being able to say that the craft isn’t going to be lost.’
Despite his love for the trade, Iván isn’t optimistic about the future. At 47 years old, he’s the youngest botero in Spain.
There are only about eight left in the entire country, and he doubts that anyone will take over from them.
‘Every year there are fewer of us, but no one seems to care. People seem to take it for granted. There’s no aid from the government and there’s no interest in publicising what we do,’ he says.
Iván is adamant that this is a family business and says that if no one in his family wants to carry on, he’ll close up shop for good. He has two daughters, but he tells me that if it were up to him, he wouldn’t want them to take over.
‘It’s a hard job. I want them to grow up around the botas and know what it takes to make them, but I want them to study and have the career that they want,’ he says.
But when I press him, he agrees that you never know. ‘I didn’t think that I would end up a botero,’ he says. ‘But life is funny. When my dad got sick, I didn’t give it a second thought. I simply had to carry on.’
(Image credit: Credit Unknown)
How to order your handmade goatskin bota
The best way to order a wineskin is through Iván’s online store botasrioja.com.
He ships within Spain and internationally. He asks for patience since he works by himself and all of the botas are made to order, but he will respond to every order.
Contact: info@botasrioja.com; +34 620 738 504
Those visiting Rioja can also purchase botas at the following shops in regional capital Logroño and at the skiing destination Ezcaray:
• Conservas Lodosilla Calle Sagasta 6, Logroño
• Tierra de Sabores Calle Benemérito Cuerpo de la Guardia Civil 2, Logroño
• La Lucí Delicatessen Gourmet Calle Portales 3, Logroño
Noah Chichester is a wine writer, educator and founder of winesofgalicia.com - the only English-language website dedicated to the study of Galician wine. He created The Wines of Galicia after spending four years living in Spain, immersed in Galician wine and culture. In addition to The Wines of Galicia, he has written for SevenFifty Daily, GuildSomm, and Fodor's.
