The Hidden Cellars of Rueda

September 14 – 19, 2026

6 Days / 5 Nights

A boutique journey for wine and cheese lovers seeking authentic encounters, hidden cellars and unforgettable flavors in the heart of Castilla.

This journey is about slowing down, tasting deeply, and connecting with the people and landscapes that shape the region.

What makes this tour unique

• Tastings in historic underground wine cellars

• Visits to artisan cheesemakers and maturation caves

• Encounters with passionate producers

• A slow exploration of rural Castilla

• Seasonal gastronomy and memorable meals

• Small group travel

WHO IS THIS FOR

This journey is designed for:

• wine lovers

• cheese enthusiasts

• curious travelers

• small groups seeking authentic experiences

Not recommended for:

• rushed travelers

• claustrophobic food lovers 

TOUR HIGHLIGHTS:

• tasting wines underground

• visiting cheese maturation caves

• harvest atmosphere

• rural gastronomy

• medieval villages

• relief moments

• enjoy Michelin Guide recommended  restaurants

THE STORY

Beneath the vineyards of Castilla lies a hidden world.

For centuries, underground caves and cellars have protected wines and cheeses from the extremes of the Castilian climate. In these silent spaces, darkness, humidity and time slowly transform simple ingredients into extraordinary flavors.

This journey invites you to step into that underground heritage.

Over six days, we will explore historic wineries carved into the earth, descend into secret cheese maturation caves, and meet the artisans who keep these traditions alive.

Along the way we will taste exceptional wines, discover the complexity of cave-aged cheeses, and experience the quiet beauty of rural Castilla during the most vibrant moment of the year: the harvest.

This is not a typical wine tour.

It is an intimate journey into the hidden soul of the region.

WHY SEPTEMBER

September is one of the most exciting moments to visit the Rueda region.

The vineyards are alive with the energy of harvest season. Grapes are arriving at the wineries, producers are working long days, and the countryside glows with the warm light of early autumn.

It is a time when wine culture feels especially vibrant and authentic.

Combined with the steady underground environments where wines rest and cheeses mature, this season offers the perfect contrast between the dynamic rhythm of harvest above ground and the timeless calm of the caves below.

You will be at the perfect moment in Rueda, because you could experience the elegance of Rueda’s nighttime harvest, when the grapes are picked at the coolest hour of the day to preserve their exceptional freshness, purity, and aromatic intensity. For discerning travelers, it’s a rare chance to discover the craftsmanship and sophistication behind one of Spain’s most distinctive white wine regions.

WHAT MAKES THIS JOURNEY UNIQUE

This Tastelands tour has been carefully designed. This journey is about slowing down, tasting deeply, and connecting with the people and landscapes that shape the region.

• Tastings in historic underground wine cellars

• Visits to artisan cheesemakers and maturation caves

• Encounters with passionate producers

• A slow exploration of rural Castilla

• Seasonal gastronomy and memorable meals

• Small group travel with exclusive access

  Who is your host?

  BEGOÑA MEDIO — FOUNDER OF TASTELANDS

  Since 2011, I have been organizing immersive journeys for apple growers , sommeliers , chefs , cheesemongers

  and curious travellers, people who want to go deeper than any guidebook takes them.

  What I know, after all these years , is this :

  travel is the most powerful tool we have for understanding each other.

  When you sit at a producer' s table, taste what they have made with their hands , and ask the questions that

  matter something shifts . You see the world differently. You go home changed.

  That is what I design these journeys for. I bring the expertise, the access and the energy. You bring the

  curiosity. The rest happens by itself.

  “I have spent the last fifteen years working at the intersection of food,

  land and people. As a consultant specializing in agri-food and gastronomic tourism, I

  have helped wineries , ciderhouses , cheese producers and fishing factories

  tell their stories and I have learned that the best way to

  understand a place is to eat and drink what it produces , with the

  people who make it.”

  Begoña speaks Spanish and English and will be with the group throughout the entire journey.

  
  

ITINERARY OVERVIEW

Day 1 – Arrival in Spain

Your private coach is waiting at Madrid Barajas airport. As the group comes together for the first time some of you arriving from across the Atlantic, others from closer by the drive west through the Castilian plateau marks the beginning of a different pace.

The landscape opens up, the sky widens, and somewhere along the way the city stops feeling relevant.

After roughly an hour, a pine forest appears. Not a small one 130 hectares of it, surrounding La Posada Real del Pinar like a quiet wall between you and everything you have left behind. This is home for the next four nights.

The evening is gentle by design. A glass of local wine, a welcome dinner prepared with the produce of the region, traditional, homemade, the kind of cooking that doesn't need to explain itself. Time to meet each other, or not to. Time to sleep.

Tomorrow, we will go underground.

Day 2 – Underground Wines of Rueda

The earth keeps its secrets well. Today, we go looking for them.

The morning begins at Bodega De Alberto, one of the historic names of the Rueda appellation. 

Before the group descends into the underground cellars, a guided visit takes us through the winemaking process as it has been passed down through generations the same hands, the same knowledge, the same stone galleries where the wines have always rested. Down here, the temperature is constant and the silence is total. It is a different kind of time.

Lunch follows in a traditional restaurant in Matapozuelos, where the kitchen works with the straightforward confidence of a place that has never needed to impress anyone: roast suckling lamb and rabbit cooked over vine shoots, the flavours of a region that wastes nothing and forgets nothing.

In the afternoon, we arrive at Quesería Campoveja, where Pedro is waiting for us, we spend time with a local shepherd, watching his flock, and understanding his day.

From the farm, we move to the quesería, where each guest makes their own fresh sheep's milk cheese with their own hands. By the end of the session, ten people who may never have held a cheese mould before have made something real. We close with a tasting of three aged cheeses paired with local wine.

The day ends at Castilla Termal Olmedo, a wellness sanctuary housed in a twelfth-century convent in the heart of the D.O. Rueda. Two hours in the thermal pools or, for those who prefer, a treatment of their choosing at their own cost.

The evening returns to the hotel,  where dinner is quiet and the conversation does the work.

Day 3 – Secret Cellars & Artisan Cheese

Today, everything happens below the surface.

The morning takes us to Bodegas Mocén in Rueda, where art and winemaking have found an unlikely and completely natural home together. The visit is a guided journey through underground galleries where the Verdejo grape becomes something mineral, precise and unmistakably of this place. Mocén has turned its cellars into a space where the act of making wine feels as intentional as the act of making anything beautiful.

After the visit, the group has a free hour in Rueda — time to walk, explore, or simply sit in the square before lunch.

Lunch is at Arrope, Twenty metres underground, inside a fifteenth-century wine cellar, a Michelin-selected kitchen produces food that takes the ingredients of the region and asks what more they can become. The name itself tells you everything: arrope is a reduced, concentrated grape that must have patience and craft transformed into something sweet and complex. The room is stone, the light is low, and the cooking is serious.

The afternoon brings us to Pozaldez, to the underground cellars of Cultivo Rubén's network of aging caves, where Spanish artisan cheeses rest in the quiet dark. This is not a museum visit. It is a working space, and walking through it with someone who understands what each wheel needs and why is a different kind of education.

Back at our hotel by early evening, the group rests. But the day is not finished.

Twenty-two kilometres, and the last light of September is fading over the vineyards. We arrive when the harvest is already underway. Standing in a vineyard at night during the Verdejo harvest is one of those experiences that needs no explanation once you are there: the temperature, the silence, the smell of ripe grapes in the dark, the particular feeling of witnessing something ancient happening around you.  A magical night harvest under the September stars.

Day 4 – Wine, Cheese & Rural Landscapes

History, provocation and a fire in the open air.

The morning takes us to Tordesillas, a name that means more than most Europeans realise, and that stops Americans in their tracks. In 1494, in this town on the banks of the Duero, Spain and Portugal sat down and divided the world between them. The Treaty of Tordesillas drew a line across the Atlantic that determined the course of an entire continent. 

Beneath one of those streets, Bodegas Muelas is a family winery housed in underground galleries that run directly below the town cellars that have been in the family for generations, tended by the same hands, producing wines that carry the character of the Verdejo grape and the particular silence of stone. The visit is intimate, guided by the family themselves, which makes it feel less like a tour and more like being invited in.

Lunch at Caín breaks the spell deliberately. After three days of tradition, history and patience, the kitchen here asks a different question: what happens when a young chef decides that none of the rules apply?.It is the kind of meal that starts a conversation.

Granja Cantagrullas sits in the landscape east of Rueda, and arriving here feels like crossing a threshold. This is not a visit , it is an immersion.

Rubén and his family receive the group as guests, not as tourists, and the difference is everything. For more than three hours, the world outside the farm stops existing. 

There is fire, there is bread made with sourdough, there is cheese at every stage of its life, and there are wines chosen by Rubén himself, natural, honest, perfectly matched to the moment.

The open-air dinner under the September sky is the kind of thing that is almost impossible to describe to someone who wasn't there.

Day 5 – A Taste of Madrid

The last breakfast at the hotel is unhurried. After four days of descending into cellars, making cheese with your hands, harvesting grapes under the stars and eating around a “MESA” with a family that welcomed you as their own, the city needs to arrive gently.

Madrid is waiting, and the afternoon belongs to each of you individually. Begoña will be at the hotel to help with check-in and make sure the transition is as smooth as possible.

What happens next is up to you. Begoña will share a curated list of suggestions, neighbourhoods worth wandering, markets, galleries, places to eat and drink that reflect the same spirit of craft and quality that has defined the past five days.

Madrid in September is one of the great pleasures of being alive, and you have earned the right to enjoy it without instruction.

At 19:30, the group comes together one last time. Queseria Cultivo IS A love letter to Spanish artisan cheese,  a shop, a cave and a philosophy all in one. Descending into the underground space in the heart of Madrid, surrounded by wheels and wedges from every corner of the country, the circle closes. 

The tasting brings together everything the journey has been about: the producers, the territories, the patience, the craft. Natural wines chosen to match. Conversation that now has five days of shared experience behind it.

This is where the journey ends underground, one last time, exactly as it began.

Tomorrow, the group disperses. The flavours and the stories travel home with each of you.

Day 6 – Farewell

BYE BYE  itinerary. No schedule.

Breakfast is included, and for some of the group it will be the last meal together. 

For others, the journey continues. A few more days in Madrid, a detour to another corner of Spain, or simply a long walk before the airport. 

Five days underground, in cellars and at tables have done that work already.

What travels home with each of you is harder to pack than a bottle of wine or a wedge of cheese though we hope you are carrying those too. 

It is the particular knowledge that comes from being somewhere slowly, with the right people, at the right moment. 

Until the next journey!

Please note that, in rare cases, the itinerary may be adjusted due to unforeseen circumstances. Should this occur, all alternative services will maintain the same level of quality, elegance, and charm with which the tour was originally designed.

ACCOMMODATION

During the journey we stay in carefully selected hotels chosen for their comfort, charm and sense of place.

Each property reflects the character of the region and offers a peaceful retreat after each day of exploration.

WHAT’S INCLUDED

• 5 nights accommodation

• breakfasts and selected gourmet meals

• private visits to wineries and cheesemakers

• curated wine and cheese tastings

• private transportation throughout the trip

• tastelands host and guidance, Bego Medio

NOT INCLUDED

• international flights, from your place to Madrid ariport, our meeting point.

• travel insurance

• personal expenses

Booking & Payment:

Price per person in a double occupancy room: 3680 euro

Price per person in a single occupancy room: 3900 euro

50% deposit required to secure your spot on the tour,

payment in full 45 days before departure.

Maximum group size 10 guests.

Do you wish to receive a copy of the full tour brochure? Have questions? Email rachel@thecheeseclub.com

CONTACTS:

TASTELANDS - BEGOÑA MEDIO

SPAIN & INTERNATIONAL 

Contact Begoña Medio Tastelands´founder 

hola@tastelands.com 

@taste_lands 

0034 686 655 593

THE CHEESE CLUB - RACHEL FREIER

FOR THE USA COMMUNITY

Contact Rachel Freier , The Cheese Club FLX

rachel@thecheeseclub.com 

@jointhecheeseclub

@thecheeseclubflx