Blame it on Rioja

Next month marks the 10th anniversary of my first visit to Rioja, a trip I have written about before. In Madrid for the wedding of my two (still) great friends Julian and Marta in July 1998, my (still) great friend Valerie and I headed north for a visit to Bilbao, by way of a small village in La Rioja’s Tierra de Cameros called El Rasillo, where we stayed the night.

I don’t have a scanner, but recently, I took digital photographs of the photo album I put together after the wedding (and preceding trip to Bilbao), which held a bunch of receipts, maps, ripped out journal entries, etc. A short selection of these follows.

I marked our trip in a yellow highlighter pen. We took the road to Alcala de Henares out of town, but came back a different way:

Here’s a detail of our map, which doesn’t list El Rasillo, but it lies along that little secondary road (LR 253) that wraps around the Embalse de González de Lacasa, a lake formed by the damming of the Río Iregua, one of the Ebro’s tributaries.

Valerie Dumova amid wildflowers, with the Embalse de González de Lacasa in the background:

Entering the Ebro Valley en route to Haro for lunch.

My receipt from lunch at Terete in Haro, specialists in traditional cordero asado, wood-roasted lamb:

A snippet from my journal, in which I describe my wine purchases:

A great picture of my lovely friend, Valerie Dumova:

Soy yo.

Smoke gets in your eyes: Actress Gwyneth Paltrow (center) and Chef Ventura Martínez (right) wait for sarmientos to smolder.

In yet another example of the power of the “Guggenheim effect” – most succinctly defined as, “If you build it with style, they will come” – the Rioja press is all atwitter after actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Bassols joined New York-based food luminaries Mark Bittman and Mario Batali earlier this week for an afternoon vegetable barbecue in front of Frank Gehry’s hotel at Bodegas Marqués de Riscal in Elciego.

But before you start planning a vineyard clambake on your next trip to Napa, I should mention: it wasn’t exactly impromptu.

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Even though I found her opening comments on the width of her spa-issued undergarments a little alarming, Yvonne Michie Horn’s piece on Rioja architecture in this past Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle travel section is nevertheless the most comprehensive article on new winery architecture in Rioja to appear in a major American publication to date.

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The UK’s Decanter Magazine, hands down the most lucid, comprehensive, and intellectually rigorous wine magazine in English, takes on Rioja Reservas from the complicated 2002 vintage in its most recent panel tasting (September 2007, pp. 77-80). Expectations were low; after picture-perfect ripening conditions in the now-heralded 2001 vintage, 2002 served the region of a cocktail of spring frosts and excessive summer rains that threatened flowering and hampered ideal ripening of the fruit. Nevertheless, the six-member tasting panel emerged “pleasantly surprised.”

As lead taster and Rioja expert John Radford puts it, with typically inventive prose, “There were no really great, head-bangingly, mind-bogglingly fantastic wines, like there would have been if this had been 2001, 2004, or 2005, but overall the quality and value for money are still there - as well as the harmony you look for in Rioja.”

To call itself a Reserva, a Rioja is required by law to age for at least three years at the bodega, including at least one year in Bourdeax-style, 225-liter oak barrels (the most palpable legacy of Rioja’s close historical connection with its northern neighbor).

“Reserva has always had the cachet of being the ‘gold standard’ in Rioja,” Radford writes, “Perhaps not the best wines, but the most reliable.”

“I love the iron fist in the velvet glove you get with really good reservas,” Ed Adams, another panelist, writes, in a phrase often used to describe Pomerol, “Acidity and tannin, but wrapped in soft, velvety fruit.”

The panel tasted 54 wines and, as is the case with all Decanter panels, rated the wines on a twenty-point scale that put them into one of five categories, one to five stars. Of those 54 wines, 28 merited *** (Recommended, 14.5-16.49 pts.), four got **** (Highly Recommended, 16.5-18.49 pts.), and two wines, Bodegas Baigorri and Marqués de Riscal, won ***** (Decanter Award, Outstanding).

How funny that the panel, which tastes wine “blind” (meaning that they are tasted without the panelists’ knowing what they are judging), should award its highest rating to two wines that not only represent two ends of the style spectrum (Baigorri, which the panel describes as “modern, clean, and attractive…well structured modern style”; and Riscal, with “soft, strawberry fruit with spice and cedar…acidity and tannin to last,” descriptors of the classic style), but also come from two of the highest profile, so-called architectural bodegas.

Nice to see two exemplars of the happy union of both style and substance.

Bodegas Baigorri

Marqués de Riscal

Spain has embraced innovation with extraordinary vigor since its transition to democracy thirty years ago—so much so that today Spain is virtually synonymous with what’s modern and cutting edge. Yet, as Giles Tremlett writes in his book, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and its Silent Past (Walker & Co., 2006), “few countries hold on to and nurture their traditions so tenderly or so enthusiastically [as Spain].” Somehow, Tremlett continues, “tradition and modernity…manage to fit snugly together.”

One of the most startling examples of this harmonic convergence of old and new in Spain can be found at the R. Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia winery in Haro, where Rioja’s most ardent defender of the classic style of winemaking recently commissioned one of the country’s most strikingly modern structures.

According to Maria Jose Lopez de Heredia, the bodega’s eloquent and tireless managing director, it was the only commission architect Zaha Hadid has ever considered via email.

What made the Lopez project so compelling for Hadid?

Project architect Jim Heverin from Hadid’s London offices explains:

The project was very ambitious in scope from the beginning, operating on various scales and timescales: a pavilion for a temporary fair in Barcelona which could be relocated back to Haro within a new visitor center/ museum which would reshape the image of a very old classical Rioja bodega. It was an intriguing combination of scopes with a client who was willing to consider all options. At all scales there was the constant thread of the new confronting the old. The pavilion would house an older pavilion, the new pavilion would sit within the old bodega and the new museum would sit within the same context. The client came to us from a friend’s recommendation and inspired by our coverage in the El Croquis magazine. She asked by email to see us and when she came we didn’t speak much, she spoke for several hours by which stage we felt part of the family. It was even more intriguing that she chose us when one sees how they work at their bodega: techniques of wine production unaltered by fashions and preserved from one generation to the next. So for her to ask us to design a new pavilion was quite a leap of faith for her, and we couldn’t really refuse someone who displayed such faith in us.

The old pavilion had been found in their outhouses and restored to its original condition. It had been originally commissioned by the great grandfather for the world fair exhibition in 1910. The proprietors of the bodega had a long succession of adding their built presence to the tradition of the bodega. The new pavilion was to be exhibited at the Alimentaria Fair in Barcelona and afterwards relocated to the bodegas at Haro in Rioja. In time the pavilion would be superseded by a new extension of cultural buildings. As such it was a stepping-stone, a bridge between the past, present and future development of the bodega.

For us the starting point was to jump into the future to determine how the present would evolve. We began this project by a series of studies exploring how the bodegas could evolve. Working backwards from these studies the pavilion began to emerge in tandem.

The pavilion would house the past, the old pavilion. Made from timber and designed in a fin de siecle style the old pavilion became a jewel within a new container. Like a series of Russian dolls the new pavilion itself was to be eventually housed within the new extension at the bodegas. The new pavilion would be just one layer in a larger composition.

Proceeding with this almost onion analogy, various studies led to a container developed in sectional cuts. The section distorts from a rectangle around the old pavilion to a distorted memory shape resembling a decanter. Which was not an intentional end point but once noticed it could not be ignored that we had designed a new bottle for an old wine.

You might recall that in last week’s post on “The Marriage of Wine and Cinema,” I referenced the restaurant double-date scene in Sideways, calling it the most accurate depiction of anxiety-fueled wine overindulgence in the history of cinema.

What a nightmare to be haunted by a lost love, to feel awkward in some forced-upon-you blind date, and to decide that rushed, four-ounce slurps of fine wine might be the only way to make the desperation of that single moment possibly more palatable.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

No, wait. I’m not bitter. (more…)

To analyze a thing’s coolness is very often to render that thing instantly uncool. Coolness erodes under excessive scrutiny and disappears entirely when the object of cool begins to luxuriate in its own bad-assedness: call it the curse of self-consciousness.

Still, there’s a variety of cool impervious to erosion. To wit:

1. “Blue in Green,” on Miles Davis’ 1959 recording, Kind of Blue, particularly John Coltrane’s solo that floats in seemingly out of nowhere.
2. The heist scene in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 film, Le Cercle Rouge.
3. The live version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” on Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Volume 4: Live 1966, captured in Manchester, England in May 1966, the fateful spring Dylan went electric. Dylan has never rocked harder; keyboardist Garth Hudson should be knighted for his performance on this song.

To this list, let us add Santiago Calatrava’s Ysios winery in the Rioja Alavesa, nestled at the base of the Sierra de Cantabria, a stone’s throw from the medieval walled city of Laguardia.

There is no winery in the world more exciting to approach from a distance than Ysios. Despite its bold design, Calatrava’s shimmering wave of metal and wood is perfectly harmonious with its surroundings. Its undulating aluminum roof echoes the craggy limestone massif above it and creates six distinct solid arcs of cedar in the main structure below it, arcs that look an awful lot like a row of giant oak barrels. In the center of the structure, a massive portico of glass and fir extends towards the south like the prow of a ship. The main reception hall lies within this prow, the focal point of a giant ship on a direct course for Laguardia: a consummately modern architect’s love letter to the past.

At Ysios in October, I learned from Javier Elizalde that Calatrava’s curvilinear roof, which rolls across a northwest to southeast axis, is also a tribute to the north wind. A supremely cool gesture that symbolizes coolness of another sort: the crucial role Atlantic winds (which actually comes in from the northwest but is always referred to locally as the “North wind”) play in shutting down Rioja vines at night, effectively preserving acidity in the grapes and ensuring a balanced final product—one of Rioja’s key climactic attributes and part of the reason why Tempranillo from Rioja is very rarely confused with Tempranillo grown anywhere else in the world and why Rioja is such an exemplary food wine.