While today"s image of beautiful fall colors in Rioja is serene and peaceful, the people of this area are hard at work harvesting grapes at 14,800 different vineyards across the region. And soon the 600 wineries in this smallest Spanish province will begin the lengthy process to turn this year"s grape harvest into its world-famous Rioja wines. (To get an idea of how tiny La Rioja province is, it makes up just 1 percent of Spain"s land area and only about 0.67 percent of Spain"s population lives here.) While winemaking techniques have evolved and improved over the thousands of years that wine has been made here, each year around this time locals and visitors gather in the region"s capital of Logroño to celebrate the wine harvest and see a traditional example of the first, uh, step of this process—crushing newly harvested grapes by stomping them with bare feet.
Falling for Rioja
Today in History
More Desktop Wallpapers:
-
Merry Christmas
-
South Padre Island, Texas
-
Once upon a time there was a bridge…
-
Crown Fountain by Jume Plensa at Millennium Park in Chicago
-
Embracing the cold
-
Amphitheatre of El Jem, Tunisia
-
Montreux, Switzerland, and all that jazz
-
Winter in England s Cotswolds
-
International Rock Day
-
The most Instagrammable bird?
-
Megalong Valley, Blue Mountains National Park, Australia
-
The smoke before the bonfire
-
Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel in Arkansas
-
Hyalite Creek at Custer Gallatin National Forest, Montana
-
A grotesque scene
-
An icy extravaganza
-
Venice Skatepark, Los Angeles, California
-
Indigenous Peoples Day
-
Hey, don t you guys have somewhere to be?
-
Happy Easter!
-
International Jazz Day
-
A showcase for future fame
-
A tower of light
-
Rainbow Mountain
-
A bull, some flowers, and a stratovolcano
-
A seabird gets schooled
-
It s leap day!
-
Let the games (finally) begin!
-
A Eurasian lynx in Siberia
-
A wheatear in Peak District National Park, England
Bing Wallpaper Gallery

