Blame it on Rioja

Manuel Ruiz, winemaker at Bodegas y Viñedos Labastida. Photo: John Barkely

Modern Rioja owes much of its early development to the winemakers of Bordeaux, who came to Rioja in search of wine to meet the demand of their markets after their own vineyards were decimated by Phylloxera in the 19th century. But in many ways Rioja is more like Burgundy. For one, like the Côte d’Or Rioja’s terroir is heterogeneous and can change rapidly from one vineyard plot to the next. Also like Burgundy, Rioja is composed of small vineyard plots owned by myriad grape growers, a fragmentation that has made it difficult for large bodegas to own significant contiguous landholdings. As a result, most bodegas buy in grapes from many sources. To give you an idea, there are around 500 wineries in Rioja and about 20,000 viticulturalists.

One way that grape growers have responded to this model is to form cooperatives, in order to negotiate better prices with the large bodegas. Some of these unions of grape growers have gone on to create their own wineries as well. One the most important of these is Bodegas y Viñedos Labastida, based in the town of the same name. They export all three of their brands–Solaguen, Castillo Labastida, and Manuel Quintano–to the U.S., and their wines have consistently received high critical marks in the U.S. press.

We spent a few hours with winemaker Manuel Ruiz when we visited Rioja last fall, who explained the cooperative concept.

“The basic structure of the family economy in upper Ebro valley hasn’t changed much in the last 150 years. Winemaking methods were of course much more rudimentary back then, but viticulture as the key component of the family economy had already been well established by then. And just as winemaking functioned in those days without the existence of the large bodegas, today that same economy maintains itself through continued individual ownership of the vineyards by the families who work them.

“As the industry grew and the model began to shift, there were disagreements over the price of the grapes between individual grape growers on one hand and the big wine companies who bought grapes from them. On many occasions, grape growers felt discriminated against, and perhaps this is the reason for the establishment of many of the cooperatives. Unions of grape growers established themselves, first, to defend their common interests and then, from there, some of those cooperatives took it a step further, dedicating themselves as well to wine production and marketing, a move that I think has made a significant contribution to providing for economic stability in this sector of the industry.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 7:09 pm and is filed under General, Bodegas, France, Red Wine, Cooperatives, History of Rioja, Phylloxera. 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.