Blame it on Rioja

Miguel Angel de Gregorio standing in his El Calvario vineyard near the town of Briones, Spain, September 11, 2007. Briones visible in the background. Photo: John Barkley.

My respect for film and video directors, scriptwriters, producers, etc., jumped a hundred-fold this winter as found myself neck deep in the tedious, time-consuming but ultimately extraordinarily gratifying work of piecing together the two-hour educational documentary tentatively titled, “Magic at the Limits of Viticulture,” a collaboration between D.O.Ca. Rioja and the Culinary Institute of America Greystone scheduled for a DVD release later this year.

In upcoming posts I will go into more detail about each stage of the production, bringing us up to where we are now. It was completely new territory for me and an object lesson in the importance of breaking down all of the myriad tasks involved into little pieces, as opposed to looking at it as a whole and getting buried under the weight of trying to do too much at once. I have the great luxury of working with an incredible team at Vibrant Rioja and CIA Greystone; another lesson was learning how to ask for help.

Why “Magic at the Limits of Viticulture”?

Well, as I said, it’s a working title, and I’m nervous about using the word “magic” for fear of sounding too new-agey or like too much like we’re making a hard sell (although they have been very hands-off up to now, the project is financed by the region itself), but there are reasons behind it.

As I was reviewing all 30 hours video and looking over two binders of transcripts in December and January, it became clear to me that we had on our hands some really amazing material, and that in that material, there emerged a handful of captured moments that would profoundly affect how I conceptualized the organization of the story.

One of those moments came on day two, in a vineyard outside Briones call El Calvario, with Finca Allende proprietor and winemaker Miguel Angel de Gregorio. No matter how you feel about his wines, the man brings so much passion and respect to his work–for wine, terrior, vines, Rioja–it’s infectious. I remember that when we closed the interview, I turned around, clenched one fist and whispered to myself “yes!” because I knew we had just captured something special. My colleagues, none of whom speaks enough Spanish to understand what had just transpired, we unphased. “You’ll see,” I told them.

Spain has almost 70 different Denomaciones de Origen, what does Rioja have that no one else has?

That’s one of the questions I asked Miguel Angel de Gregorio. Here’s my translation of his response.

Uy! Tantas cosas. Rioja es mágica….

Uy! So many things. Rioja is magic. Rioja is unique and inimitable, first, because of the richness and diversity of its terroirs.

No other area in Spain has such a rich endowment of terroirs: diverse soil types, varied expositions to the sun, these mountainous elevations.

There is a second reason: we’re an Atlantic climate in a Mediterranean country, in a warm and dry country.

We have our share of water shortages; in a typical year, Briones will get about 600 liters of rainfall, which is less than half of what Bordeaux gets. This is why we still grow bush vines instead of training our vines higher.

At the same time, we’re influenced by winds coming in from the Atlantic. Ours is one of those climates at the limits of the viticulture. Go 10 to 15 kilometers beyond this vineyard, and vines won’t ripen, they cannot ripen. We’ve already reached the limit, that limit where you’ll find all the great wine-producing areas of the world: Alsace, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Piedmont. They’re all found in marginal climates, where vineyards almost shouldn’t exist. But this is where you find aromatic complexity, that complexity of elements in perfect alignment, where vineyards using the same grape variety are nevertheless unique and unrepeatable.

Stay tuned for more excerpted interviews.

It was quite a thrill to learn on Friday on my way to work that Blame it on Rioja was nominated for a 2008 Amercian Wine Blog Award for “Best Single Subject Wine Blog.” This is only the second year Tom Wark of Fermentation has administered these awards, and from the looks of it, Mr. Wark is working assiduously to enhance even further the credibility and standards of the awards, as this year he recruited a panel of anonymous judges, presumably wine and or blogging insiders, to ensure that popular nominees are also maintaining a certain amount of editorial rigor.All of which makes it even more of an honor to be chosen to hang with the big dogs.

Okay, so the world of wine blogging is still a new dog run, and one that’s not without its critics, but I suspect that even the snarkiest of print wine journalists have done a few drive bys, if they haven’t already jumped in. It’s people like Tom Wark, and initiatives like the the American Wine Blog Awards, that continue to raise wine blogging’s profile in the popular imagination while at the same time encouraging its practitioners to continue raising the bar of excellence in their own work.

Congratulations fellow nominees (including my friends–and now bitter arch rivals!–Gabriella and Ryan over at Catavino.net); I’m looking forward to spending a little quality time looking over all of your sites and learning more than a few things along the way.

Adrian Murcia
New York City

Click here to vote for Blame it on Rioja today! Votes must be in by Midnight, March 29, 2008

A Table, Perfectly Set: Jamón Ibérico, Queso Manchego, and Vinos de Rioja, Finca Valpiedra, Cenicero, Spain, May 2006. Photo: José Guerra.

Apart from being the essential guide to anyone interested understanding the science of food, Harold McGee’s On Food and Coooking (Scribner, 2004) is filled with aphorisms of great resonance and economy. My favorite among them, which I first encountered as a quote in Peter Kaminsky’s terrific book on pork love, Pig Perfect (Hyperion, 2005), has become something of a mantra for me:

“Rotten grapes (wine), moldy milk (cheese), and ripened meat (ham) make our lives more interesting.”

After years of dawdling, I finally decided to begin the long and uncertain road towards attaining the title of Master Sommelier, an accreditation administered by the American chapter of the Court of Master Sommeliers and the top recognition for wine (and spirits) knowledge, service abilities, and professionalism in the hospitality trade.

At present there are 96 Master Sommeliers in the U.S.–including, of course, my mentor and colleague, Roger Dagorn–and 187 worldwide, according to a February 20 Business Wire article announcing the nine wine professionals most recently awarded the prestigious title, Jesse Becker, Chris Blanchard, Drew Hendricks, Geoff Kruth, Joseph Linder, Joseph Phillips, Steven Poe, Sean Razee, and Emily Wines. (You might recall that two MS’s, Jason Smith and Juan Gómez, joined us last fall in Rioja, while we were filming our educational documentary.)

There are four distinct levels of examination, the Introductory course and exam, the Certified Sommelier exam, the Advanced exam, and the Master’s Diploma exam. Each level of exam is more rigorous than the last, as what you’re expected to know becomes more detailed and arcane, and the less forgiving judges become in assessing your service abilities and deductive blind-tasting assessments. Pass rates for the first level hover around 85% or so; by contrast, only 5% of candidates pass all three components of the Master’s diploma exam. Candidates for the Master Sommelier title get three chances to pass all three, otherwise Master’s candidates lose credit for those components they did pass and are obliged to start the level from scratch. The top scorer at each Master’s exam, who manages to pass all three components in one go, is awarded the Krug Cup. The most recent Krug Cup winner was Emily Wines.

Last Friday, I passed the first level, after two days of sitting with 77 colleagues in the private dining room of Gilt Restaurant in the Palace Hotel, reviewing viticulture, vinification, and the world’s major wine regions. We also reviewed and practiced the Court’s Deductive (”blind”) Tasting Format–also known as “building the grid”–a fascinating and surprisingly reliable means of drawing conclusions about a wine only after systematically assessing its color, viscosity, and likely age, and identifying at least three fruit associations, all of its non-fruit aromas and flavors (flowers, spices), and its degree of earthiness (a category further subdivided into organic–mushrooms, for example–and inorganic–wet stone, for example).

It was cramped and chilly and jam-packed with minutiae, list making, and map gazing–and I loved every minute of it. I am also happy to report that I missed only two of the 70 questions on the exam, and along with one other candidate, was singled out at the reception on Friday for having the top score.

It ain’t no Krug Cup, but it’s a start.

It’s one of those questions that has troubled me for as long as I can remember: when describing a single grape type–Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, for example–is “grape varietal” synonymous with “grape variety”?

In other words, is it correct for me to say or write, “Tempranillo is the dominant black grape varietal in Rioja”?

No, says Jancis Robinson MW, in a recent post on Catavino.

“They are used interchangeably - but wrongly!” Ms. Robinson says in a follow-up comment to a Catavino interview conducted two weeks ago in Barcelona.

“Variety is the noun and applies to plants and vines,” she explains in a clarification sent to Catavino’s Gabriella Opaz via Blackberry. “Varietal is an adjective that can be applied to wines named after the variety from which it was made! Sorry to fuss but it would be useful to keep these two terms distinct.”

Usage distinctions like these, which help writers and public speakers think more carefully about language (and potentially steer clear of public embarrassment), might be very English, but they ain’t fussy.

So here’s to you, Ms. Robinson: rock on varietally.