The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky (1999) — The best introduction to the Basques as a people: their language, their culture, their mysterious origins, and their deep attachment to a landscape that includes the hills around Laguardia. Kurlansky writes with the same enthusiasm he brought to Cod and Salt, making a complex political and cultural story accessible and engaging. Essential reading before visiting any part of the Basque Country.
Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett (2006) — A British journalist's attempt to understand modern Spain by excavating what the country has chosen to forget: the Civil War, the Franco years, and the cultural amnesties that followed. The Basque Country features prominently, including its complicated relationship with ETA and the broader Spanish state. The chapter on wine culture and regional identity illuminates why places like Laguardia and Rioja Alavesa feel so intensely themselves.
The New Spain by Gerry Dawes (2004) — A wine writer's portrait of Spain's vineyards and the people who make wine in them. Rioja and Rioja Alavesa get substantial coverage, with profiles of producers and a sense of the landscape that's more vivid than most wine writing. Useful both for understanding what you're drinking in Laguardia and for planning which bodegas to visit.
Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom (2006) — A literary thriller set in 1940, just after the Spanish Civil War, that captures the paranoid atmosphere of early Francoism. The Basque Country is present only as an absence — a place of loss and exile — but the novel gives the clearest sense of the period any novel of the era has managed, and the historical background it provides transforms a visit to any Spanish town with medieval walls and a complicated past.