Werkspoorfestival 2026: three days of a pairing restaurant built around Casa Rojo
A pop-up restaurant in the middle of the Werkspoorkathedraal. A three-course menu at €39 per guest, designed around three Casa Rojo wines. Two dinner services and one lunch across the Easter weekend.
A pairing restaurant in the middle of the festival
Cordier partnered with Meisjes van de Wijn to bring Casa Rojo to Werkspoorfestival 2026 in a format that put the wines in their most flattering context: a pop-up restaurant across the Easter weekend, hosted together with Sevilla. Three services across three days: two dinners and one lunch. A full three-course menu at €39 per guest, designed around three Casa Rojo wines. Alongside the restaurant, we also ran a dedicated one-hour Casa Rojo masterclass for 20 attendees, led by one of our sommelières, going deeper into the producer and the three wines than the restaurant service allowed for.
The brief was clear. This was not a wine bar with snacks, and it was not a restaurant with a wine list on the side. It was a restaurant where the food existed because of the wine. Sevilla's chef developed the menu from the wines up, with each course designed to show what La Gabacha Sauvignon Blanc, El Gordo del Circo Verdejo, and Machoman Monastrell actually do on the plate.
This report describes how the restaurant ran across the weekend, what guests responded to at the table, and what the format tells us about how Casa Rojo resonates with a Dutch audience when the context is right.
A neighbourhood festival in Utrecht's industrial heart
Werkspoorfestival takes over the Werkspoorkathedraal and its surrounding industrial site for four days every Easter weekend. It is one of Utrecht's most loved local events, drawing around 20,000 visitors across the long weekend.
The crowd is deliberately broad. Families walking through during the day, young professionals meeting friends in the afternoon, couples coming for dinner in the evening, neighbours from the surrounding districts dropping in after work. What holds it together is a shared openness to discovery: visitors come looking for the next good thing to eat, drink, see, or hear. It is an environment where people expect to be introduced to something new, and where a recommendation from someone who knows their stuff lands properly.
That mix matters for a wine activation. A festival like this does not deliver a single demographic; it delivers a curious cross-section of the Dutch urban public, reached over a concentrated weekend in one of the country's most architecturally striking venues.
Three partners, one restaurant, in the middle of the festival
The pop-up sat in the middle of the Werkspoorkathedraal floor plan, surrounded by the wider festival programme. Reservations only, fixed time slots across three services, a full three-course menu for every guest who sat down. €39 per guest. Modern Spanish-inspired cooking, every course built around one of three Casa Rojo wines. The entire space, from tables to menus to signing, carried Casa Rojo branding, so that every guest walked into a setting that made the producer as visible as the wine in the glass.
Sevilla
Sevilla's chef led the menu development for all three festival days. Every course on the card was built around one of the three Casa Rojo wines, not the other way around. That meant the pairings felt intentional rather than decorative. Guests tasted what the wines could do when the food was designed to meet them.
Meisjes van de Wijn
Our team worked the restaurant floor across all three days, introducing each wine at the table, walking guests through the pairings, and answering the inevitable questions about the bottles. The same pre-festival training we did for our wider bar team applied here: every sommelière could speak to the wines, the producer, and the reasoning behind each pairing.
A three-course pairing designed around the wines
Modern Spanish-inspired cooking, built course by course to match the character of each Casa Rojo wine. The menu below reflects how the pairings were presented at the table.
Optional to add: chocolade cheesecake as a dessert course, available separately alongside the three-course pairing.
Menu developed by Sevilla's chef, built around the Casa Rojo wines from the first sketches onward.
A Casa Rojo masterclass, led by one of our sommelières
Alongside the restaurant service, we ran a separate one-hour Casa Rojo masterclass on site for 20 attendees. Where the restaurant format had to balance wine with food and pace, the masterclass had the room to slow down and go properly into the producer and the three wines.
One of our sommelières led the session, walking attendees through Casa Rojo's philosophy, how the estate works, and what sits behind each of the three labels on the menu: La Gabacha, El Gordo del Circo and Machoman. The format gave attendees time to taste carefully, ask questions, and dig into the kind of detail a restaurant service cannot deliver.
For Casa Rojo specifically, the masterclass created 20 informed brand ambassadors in a single hour: people who left not just having tasted the wines, but actually understanding the house behind them. That is a level of engagement a bar pour or even a pairing menu cannot match on its own.
Three wines, three moments in the meal
The three wines Cordier brought covered a full tasting arc from fresh to powerful. What we saw at the table was how each one behaved with the course it was paired with, and how guests responded.
La Gabacha
The opener. The red lobster on the label pulled guests in before anyone had poured a drop. By the time the dorade arrived, the room had settled and the meal had its rhythm.
El Gordo del Circo
The surprise of the menu. Guests arrived with a fixed idea of what Verdejo tastes like; this was not that idea. The salmorejo pairing gave it room to show what it actually does, and this was the course where the most questions came across the table.
Machoman
The wine that sold bottles. The name and the label do half the work, the pairing did the rest. Several tables moved from the pairing pour to a full bottle of Machoman before dessert was mentioned.
What the three wines did in volume
Across the three services, with 160 guests at the table, we poured 90 bottles of Casa Rojo. The balance between the three wines lines up with what we saw at the table: Verdejo ahead as the curiosity-driver, Machoman close behind as the bottle-seller, La Gabacha doing its job as the opener.
La Gabacha
24
Bottles poured
El Gordo del Circo
36
Bottles poured
Machoman
30
Bottles poured
Total across the weekend
90 bottles
Three Casa Rojo wines, three services, 160 guests at the table. An average of roughly one bottle for every two guests, on top of the wine included in the pairing arrangement.
What happened around the restaurant, before and during
The restaurant was the centrepiece, but it sat inside a wider campaign. Newsletters, social posts across three channels, a Machoman-inspired poster used in the run-up to the weekend, a dedicated blog on our own site, and full on-site branding all combined to put Casa Rojo in front of a substantial audience before, during and after the pop-up.
Newsletter impressions
Two dedicated newsletters from Meisjes van de Wijn (to 5,000 subscribers) and one from Sevilla (to 9,000 subscribers). Every send featured the full Casa Rojo × Sevilla menu and walked subscribers through the three wines and the pairings.
Social reach across three channels
Sevilla (16K), Werkspoorfestival (7.5K) and Meisjes van de Wijn (3.5K) all ran organic posts about the pop-up. Because the same campaign ran across three independent feeds, the weekend felt visible from multiple angles in the weeks leading up to it.
A Casa Rojo label, translated into a Sevilla announcement
We designed a poster that pulled directly from the Machoman label: same muscular character, same visual energy, adapted into a paella-holding Werkspoorfestival invitation. It captures what the collaboration felt like in one image: Casa Rojo's attitude meeting Sevilla's kitchen.
The poster ran as a printed flyer handed out with every bill at Sevilla restaurant in the weeks leading up to the pop-up. Guests finishing their dinner at Sevilla left with a direct invitation to the Casa Rojo weekend, carrying the Machoman visual home with them.
A permanent feature on our site
Beyond the temporary newsletter and social posts, we wrote a full blog article about Casa Rojo for the Meisjes van de Wijn website. It covers the producer's philosophy, the three wines on the menu, and why their approach resonates with how we work. Unlike the rest of the campaign, this asset stays live: searchable, shareable, and a permanent reference point for anyone looking up Casa Rojo in Dutch.
Casa Rojo visible at every table
The restaurant itself was branded throughout: tables, menu cards, signing at the entrance, visuals around the space. Every guest who sat down was surrounded by Casa Rojo visuals, not just by a bottle on the table. The producer became part of the setting rather than a name on the wine list, which made the storytelling at the table feel consistent with what guests were already seeing around them.
How guests responded across the three courses
The pop-up format gave us something a bar rarely can: time. Guests sat down for a full three-course experience, and that changed what the wines could do and what our sommelières could say about them. Across the three services, the patterns were consistent.
The conversations the pairings started
With La Gabacha, the label was the way in. Guests asked about the lobster before they asked about the wine, and the dorade pairing gave our sommelières the natural hook to talk about Casa Rojo as a house. Several tables ordered a separate glass in addition to the pairing pour.
With El Gordo del Circo, the questions started coming from the other side of the table. Guests assumed they knew what Verdejo tasted like, and the salmorejo pairing made it clear that assumption did not hold. This was the course where our sommelières spent the most time explaining, and the course where guests most often wanted a bottle to take the conversation home.
With Machoman, the bottle sold itself. Name, label, reputation all compound, and the Ibérico pork cheek pairing did exactly what it was supposed to: turn the pairing pour into a full bottle order. This was where the evening bottle sales consistently happened, usually before the chocolade cheesecake was on the table.
"What I noticed was how many tables started talking to each other about the wines. A couple next to a group of friends, strangers comparing notes on the salmorejo course. That does not usually happen at a festival."MvdW sommelière, on the restaurant floor
Five observations from a weekend at the table
The restaurant format changed what the wines could do
A wine served by the glass at a bar has to prove itself in seconds. A wine served with a course built around it gets the context it deserves. All three Casa Rojo wines showed more at the table than they would have at a pouring bar, and the difference was visible in how guests responded.
Sevilla's chef-first approach made the pairings believable
Because the menu was built from the wines up, not the other way around, the pairings felt intentional. Guests could taste the logic in the combinations, which made them more willing to trust our sommelières when we introduced wines they did not know. The chef and the wines were working together rather than in parallel.
El Gordo del Circo drove the most engagement and the most volume
Across all three services, El Gordo del Circo consistently drew the most active engagement at the table. Guests commented on it, asked about it, and frequently ordered a separate glass in addition to the pairing. It also ended up as the best-selling of the three wines by volume: 36 bottles across the weekend, ahead of both Machoman (30) and La Gabacha (24). The salmorejo course was also where the kitchen was most often complimented on the combination.
Machoman sold bottles, not just glasses
Guests regularly moved from the pairing pour to a full bottle of Machoman during the main course. The name and the label give it a head start, and the pairing with the Ibérico pork cheek gave guests the excuse they were looking for to commit to the whole bottle. At 30 bottles over the weekend, Machoman landed just behind El Gordo del Circo in volume, and with a very different buying pattern behind it: fewer separate glasses, more full-bottle orders at the table.
Fixed time slots and a set menu gave the experience its structure
Reservations in fixed time slots with a single three-course menu removed friction from the floor. Guests arrived with clear expectations, the kitchen ran to a consistent rhythm across three days, and our sommelières could focus entirely on the wines and the conversation. The format is directly repeatable.