Marcos Eguren: Some History and Background
Marcos Eguren at Viñedos de Páganos in Rioja Alavesa, in front of the vineyard used to make El Puntido. Photo: Jon Stamell.
As I mentioned in my last post, Marcos Eguren is member of a family of vine growers now in its fifth generation. The Egurens have been marketing wines under their own label since 1958, when brothers Guillermo and Victorino Eguren launched Sierra Cantabria with bother-in-law Martín Cendoya, a viticulturalist.
Today, Marcos Eguren, Guillermo’s son, heads both vineyard management and winemaking, having expanded the brand not only in Rioja, with Sierra Cantabria spin-offs Señorío de San Vicente and Viñedos de Páganos, but also in other parts of Spain, most notably in Toro, where Numathia Termes has raised more than a few eyebrows among the foreign wine press.
Mr. Eguren is soft spoken and eminently cordial (he sent “thank you for visiting” emails to each of us within hours of our interview at Viñedos de Páganos), and while there is little doubt that he is intimately acquainted with every last technical detail of his bodegas’ operations, he seems refreshingly free of ego. When John Barkley mentioned that we had seen a helicopter landing pad in the area from a hot air balloon that morning, Eguren quietly acknowledged that it did indeed belong to his bodega, almost embarrassed by the luxury.
Eguren’s high-end wines are unmistakably modern: site-specific, highly extracted, aged in French oak. Sierra Cantabria is still the flagship brand and remains one of the region’s best values; it’s the group’s most classic Rioja brand, aged in American oak and available in all of the traditional Rioja aging categories: Crianza, Reserva, Gran Reserva. The relatively newly established bodegas belonging to the family, Señorío de San Vicente and Páganos produce the single-vineyard big hitters: San Vicente, Amancio, Finca El Bosque, La Nieta, and El Puntido.
“Marcos Eguren is so grounded, so human, so natural,” Kerin Auth told me recently. “His essence is his vineyards and his family, and that’s really all that matters to him.”
Ms. Auth, a longtime friend of mine (we met in a wine class back in 2001) and a frequent traveler to Spain, runs the New York City sales team for Tempranillo, Inc., which distributes not only all of the Eguren family’s many wine properties, but also a jaw-dropping list of top-flight Spanish wines that includes some of the best known and highly praised bodegas of Rioja: Muga, Allende, Remírez de Ganuza, and Benjamin Romeo, all wines brought into the U.S. by high-profile importer Jorge Ordoñez.
“Marcos is always experimenting,” she continued, “And the reason why his wines are so successful in New York is that he has a little bit of everything—different wines for different tastes.
“But he doesn’t overdo it. It’s really all about capturing Tempranillo in all of its glorious faces.”
In Wines of Rioja, John Radford writes:
What we’re seeing under the stewardship of Marcos Eguren is a gradual move away from the centralized processing of grapes trucked in from around the region to individual bodegas making wines from grapes grown in their own backyard which is, of course, what the concept of terroir is all about.
Check back tomorrow, when we’ll drop right into our conversation in September, as Marcos Eguren answers the critics of the modern style and explains why there seems to be so much generational continuity among family grape growers and vintners in Rioja.