Blame it on Rioja

Spanish wine expert par excellence Helio San Miguel, the man behind the Cervantes Institute’s vaunted Wines of Spain Seminar Series, last year devoted an entire evening to a vertical tasting of Bodegas Miguel Merino Reservas called ‘Under the Radar,’ beginning with Merino’s first vintage, 1994, explaining in the course handout that “Miguel Merino wines are always the biggest surprise at blind tastings, time after time outperforming the most optimistic expectations and eclipsing much more famous names.”

In Wines of Rioja (Mitchel Beazley, 2004), John Radford writes that Merino’s “self-effacing charm [and] devotion to his bodega…ensure that one day he will be a superstar of Rioja.”

Merino set up his small bodega in the early 1990s on the outskirts of Briones, a quaint hilltop village in the Rioja Alta sub-region, after a career devoted to the business and marketing side of the wine industry. Today, he works nine hectares of his own vineyards (augmenting his harvest with grapes from a few growers nearby) and makes a silky and approachable wine with the impressive structure of a modern-styled Rioja and the admirable and food-friendly finesse of a more classically-styled Rioja. I’ve used his wines in three tastings over the last year and a half; to my taste, Merino’s wines are lovely example of a modern Rioja with a recognizably Riojano taste.

• Tomorrow, Friday, July 20, if you live in the New York area, you can taste for yourself: the East Village’s Tinto Fino, an elegant little shop devoted exclusively to Spanish wines, will be hosting a tasting of Merino’s newly released 2000 Reserva from 6:00p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

For more information: www.tintofino.com