Hermanos Hernáiz takes its name from brothers Eduardo and Víctor Hernáiz, who took charge of Finca La Emperatriz in Baños de Rioja after their family acquired the estate in 1996. The vineyard itself is far older: it belonged to Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III and the last Empress of France, who entered a wine from these vines at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition — where it won a prize and first marked the site out as exceptional.
The estate sits at 570 metres on one of the highest plateaus in Rioja Alta, twelve kilometres south of Haro, in clear view of both the Sierra de Cantabria and the Sierra de la Demanda. Its soil is unlike anything else in the region: a layer of large white pebbles roughly 40 cm deep over loose sandy loam. The stones drain hard and reflect light back into the canopy, imposing a degree of water stress that yields small, concentrated berries — and giving the wines their signature minerality, tension and ageing capacity. The position at the appellation's north-western limit brings a cooler, more Atlantic-influenced climate than most of Rioja, so Tempranillo here ripens late, through September and October.
Although the estate reads as one continuous block, the brothers farm it as a mosaic of individual plots, each managed according to its vine age, rootstock, variety and training system. In 2020 they simplified the range decisively and renamed the business Hermanos Hernáiz, keeping the Finca La Emperatriz name for the top red and white — both certified Viñedo Singular, Rioja's highest single-vineyard classification — with El Jardín de La Emperatriz as their younger siblings from the same estate. El Pedal, the entry-level Tempranillo, draws on the family's other Rioja Alta holdings in Cenicero, Fuenmayor, Navarrete and Hornos de Moncalvillo.