Viva Rioja: Rioja in a Nutshell
Author’s Note: My “Letters from Haro” series will resume on Friday, picking up where we left off last, on Tuesday afternoon, September 11. My notebook and laptop contain enough reflections, profiles, and images to keep “Letters” going for at least another month, but in the interest of brevity, coverage of my recent trip to Rioja should wrap up sometime next week. And although I have been back in the U.S. for over a week now, I will continue using the same title for the series, a nod to consistency and a reflection of the fact that much of what you will read was indeed written while I was still on the ground in Spain.
Waking up somewhat disoriented and jetlagged last Monday morning, I nevertheless had little choice but to rally to prepare for my class at Murray’s Cheese in Greenwich Village the following evening. I had told MC’s Taylor Cocalis back in August that I wanted to teach the class, “Viva Rioja,” while my experience in Spain was still fresh in my memory, but now I was wishing I had allowed myself a full week’s recovery before venturing into any kind of public-speaking arena.
In the event, it was one of my best classes ever. The fifteen wine and cheese enthusiasts, with an estimated median age of about 35 years old, were really into the subtle flavor nuances of the categories and styles of Rioja wines I decided to use, and thankfully, their eyes didn’t glaze over when I went over the history, topography, and climate diversity of the region. There was a great vibe in the room, and luxuriating in that energy reminded why I love teaching so much.
Trying to give the class a little snapshot of the region as it stands today, through six wines, that’s what I was aiming for. I mulled around some thoughts on my way to class, and what came out in the first ten to fifteen minutes, by way of introduction, is summarized below. Beware the casual reader. The prose is pretty dense. I guess I wanted to come up with a paragraph that for me represented “Rioja in a nutshell.” Maybe I’m the nut for even trying such a thing, but here goes anyway. I can already hear the voice of my friend Rachel Jensen (the lady who named this blog), using one of her favorite expressions, employed usually when my jokes totally bomb but perhaps also appropriate here. (To hear what I’m hearing, imagine the intonation and volume of a parent calling a child home for dinner from a kick ball game being played fifty feet away):
“Adrian! Editing!”
BioR-RiaN
Diverse in soil, climate, and elevation, D.O.Ca. Rioja lies in the upper reaches of Spain’s Ebro depression, an alluvial plain that fans out between two mountain ranges like a giant bullhorn aimed at the Mediterranean Sea. At the apex of this funnel, where Rioja’s best vineyards lie, mountains to the north and south keep weather extremes largely at bay while moderate streams of Atlantic winds blowing in from the northwest keep vines healthy.
Since the Middle Ages, Rioja has played host to legions of passing travelers, its first marketers. With close ties to French winemaking traditions, Rioja both updated its technology and expanded its market when phylloxera devastated the vineyards of France in the latter part of the 19th century. By the second half of the 20th century, the wine industry in Rioja, made up largely of small grape growers and large bodegas that sourced grapes from all over the region, had managed to capitalize on all of these factors to create a product whose overall consistency in quality and value, year in and year out, was unmatched anywhere else in the world, a fact that remains true even today.
In recent years, revolutions in winemaking technology, shifts in consumer preferences, and the explosive growth of the Spanish wine industry overall have inspired a new generation of winemakers in Rioja to rethink long held notions of what a bottle of Rioja should taste like. These innovators, many of them both grape growers and winemakers, have reassessed soil, vine, and barrel to turn out wines falling under a wide spectrum of styles, all standing in varying degrees of contrast to the “classic style” pioneered by the innovators of mid-19th century. And today it is not uncommon to see two bodegas, each making a radically different style of wine from the other, sitting cheek-by-jowl on the same avenue, quite harmoniously. This, to me, is Rioja.
Tomorrow: What we tasted