Notes from the North of Spain, Day Five: Press Wine for Breakfast
Photo credit: Gretchen Thomas
Friday, September 12, 2008
Absolutely gorgeous morning in Rioja today, a little cold even, as we arrive to our first destination, Bodegas Fernando Remírez de Ganuza in Sanmaniego, a town in the Rioja Alavesa nestled right up under the Sierra de Cantabria mountains . The winery is just off the town’s main square, an impeccably clean and eminently modern facility cloaked in traditional garb, the kind of place that I imagine a lot of people conjure up when they imagine owning a bodega in Rioja. Most but not all of the winery’s vineyards are on a southward-facing slope just below the town, a stone’s throw from the bodega. The soil here is limestone and clay; elevation between 550 and 600 meters above sea level.
Export manager Luis Alberto greets us and is quite amenable to our suggestion that we begin with a tasting of the wines before continuing with the tour. Too often we’ve found ourselves hurrying through tastings after being led a lengthy tour, and knowing that our day booked solid, I’m determined to keep us on schedule.
Wine writer Gerry Dawes introduced me to the notion of certain modern Rioja winemakers’ having classic palates, and I think Fernando Remírez de Ganuza is one of them. I also think that these are the kind of wines that show better with some bottle age. The bodega’s now scarce 2001 Reserva, a wine we used to carry at Chanterellle and which I sampled again recently at a Tempranillo, Inc. tasting in New York, is a superlative Rioja, balanced, elegant, possessing heft for sure but so delicately structured, so remarkably alive with acidity, so aromatically dazzling, that I was half-tempted to buy a magnum of it for lunch.
The 2004 Reserva (90% Tempranillo, 10% Graciano; with 2 years in all new oak, 80% French and 20% American) on the other hand, while aromatically enticing (red fruit, violets, baking spices, and tar), struck me as a little young, a bit muted. I don’t expect that to be the case in a couple of years’ time. The bodega’s 2005 Trasnocho was a real eye-opener. Press wine is what you could call “squeeze wine,” the dense and extremely tannic result taking what’s left in the fermentation tank after the free-run juice is siphoned off and squeezing the hell out of it. Winemakers then typically add small amounts of this to their barrels, using it almost like a seasoning.
Not here. Using a method of his own design, Sr. Remírez de Ganuza drops a plastic membrane into his tanks and fills it slowly with warm water, gently pressing the contents for 24 hours (it used to be done in half the time, overnight, hence the name), so as not to extract the harsh and bitter tannins from the pips.
With 20 months in new French oak barrels and 12 in bottle before release, the Trasnocho is still quite tannic and certainly not your typical Rioja. It’s a beautiful wine nevertheless-very dense, very pretty, herbaceous, mouth-watering. It’s also unavailable in the U.S. market and, unsurprisingly, made in very small quantities.