Blame it on Rioja

Welcome to BLAME IT ON RIOJA, a new wine blog dedicated exclusively to Spain’s premier quality winemaking region—its products, personalities, landscape, and history.

Uncork a Rioja crianza, let the fruity and seductive Tempranillo grape nudge your senses, and join me on an insider’s tour of one of the world’s richest epicurean enclaves.

Commisioned by the region itself, BLAME IT ON RIOJA is nevertheless a highly personal enterprise: a practical guide to a region in flux as seen through the eyes of a working sommelier, opinionated journalist, and unreformed lifetime Riojaphile.

About that last part, allow me a moment to elaborate.

I’ve nurtured an obsession for Rioja wines since my days as a student in Madrid in the early 1990s, but it took an impromptu detour to Rioja in the late 1990s to seal the deal.

Over a plate of wild partridge and a glass of young Rioja in the summer of 1998, my food and wine worldview would be rocked forever.

On a hastily-planned pilgrimage from Madrid to Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in July 1998, my friend Valerie and I decided to call it a night in El Rasillo, a hillside village nestled in the rolling hills of Tierra de Cameros in La Rioja.

At dinner in town, I ordered escabeche de perdiz (wild partridge flash-seared and then marinated for several hours in olive oil, vinegar, and herbs) and an unlabelled, green-tinted bottle of the vino de la casa, a house wine which turned out to be a Rioja joven (a lively and fruity unoaked young red).

After dinner, Valerie and I stepped outside onto the restaurant’s terrace and gazed out over the valley towards tiny villages flickering like fireflies along the opposite hill.

For a few brief moments, under the fading glow of that perfect summer evening, all was well in the universe.

Suddenly, it was clear to me that a happy confluence of food, wine, people, and place represented one of life’s most elevated and satisfying pleasures, a harmony of elements—both simple and potentially transformative—that together make life’s darker moments worth enduring. A harmony that convinced me that I should spend the rest of my professional life illuminating its essential components in print.

No other country in the world respects this harmony more than Spain, and no other region in Spain is more richly endowed with its constituent elements than Rioja.

More than just Spain’s top wine region, Rioja reflects an entire way of life—one centered on the appreciation of local customs and traditions, connection to the land and its products, enjoyment of wine and food together as a matter of course, and the communion of friends and family above all else.

La Rioja (the political region) and Rioja (the wine region) together constitute a microcosm of modern Spain: so much has changed here in the past twenty years, and yet so much remains the same.

Steadfast traditionalism thrives alongside restless innovation, be it in the realm of architecture, food, or winemaking.

Despite the fact that much of the region is in the process of recasting itself stylistically, there are no wine wars here, merely soul-soothing elements in exquisite equipoise.

When I told a Spanish friend that Vibrant Rioja had asked me to launch a web journal devoted to a region I have loved so well for so long, he confessed, “Que trabajo más bonito.”

Ricardo was right; it’s a lovely job.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Culture, Food pairings, General, Personal Travels, Rioja, Personal Travels, Spain, Spain, Vibrant Rioja. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.