Blame it on Rioja

Two weeks ago today, I moderated a Rioja tasting in the meatpacking district of New York, leading some of the city’s top wine practitioners in the press and restaurant industry through a series of Riojas blancos, rosados and tintos from a broad range of styles.

Largely the brainchild of Pia Mara Finkell of CRT/tanaka, the agency that administers the Vibrant Rioja campaign and at whose NYC offices the tasting took place, the panel tasting provided a unique, relaxed venue in which tasters of disparate backgrounds and palate preferences could have a free-form discussion about the wines being tasted, about the state of Rioja wine in general, and, occasionally, about the complex interplay today among winemakers, wine critics, and the consumers who keep the whole game in play.

Our point of departure was Rioja’s 2001 Gran Reservas. Gran Reserva is the age category at the summit of the Rioja’s age classification system, and 2001 has been widely regarded as one of the best to have been experienced in Rioja in many years. According to one of our panelists, Gerry Dawes, Paco Hurtado of Bodegas Marques de Riscal said that the fruit from the 2001 vintage was the best he’s ever seen.

But what made the biggest impression on me was how enthusiastically one of our whites, the Capellania from Marques de Murrieta, was received by our panel. I have written about this wine before: a new wine from a classic bodega undergoing major changes which nevertheless harkens back to a former time, when whites exhibiting the beguiling aromatic traits that can come only from controlled oxidation were the norm in Rioja. Six months ago, only one wine shop carried this wine; two weeks ago, I picked one up from Union Square Wine.

I guess what attracts me most to this wine, and to the sentiments with which it was received, is that hodgepodge of new and old. Just when you are tempted to disparage the fact that Marques de Murrieta, the oldest winery in Rioja, is cutting the oak time that its flagship Castillo Ygay sees, the current owner, the Conde de Creixell, and his ace winemaker, Ana Vargas, come up with the Capellania.

A study in contrast and a wrench in the black and white argument that rages among wine influentials these days. More thoughts to come.

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.”

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.

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.”

LIVING THE DREAM: Gabriella Opaz (left) and Ryan Opaz of Catavino

When I’m not busy envying them their chosen career paths, I’m invariably and almost daily drawn to their wine blog/web compendium of all things Iberian and vinous, www.catavino.net. If you’ve ever done even the slightest bit of online research on Spanish or Portuguese wines, you’ve doubtless encountered them too (and maybe even also wished you had their life).

I’m of course talking about husband-and-wife team Gabriella and Ryan Opaz (pictured above, copitas at the ready), who, according to the bio on their website, left the U.S. for Spain sight-unseen in 2004 with a few thousand dollars in their back pockets and, presumably, a high tolerance for uncertainty. Gabriella taught English while Ryan “scoured the streets for work in the wine trade,” launching Catavino in 2005 initially merely to “record his frustrations.” Today, Catavino is the most comprehensive, informative, and tech-savvy online resource for Spanish wine in English, with 10,000 unique visitors per month.

This week the duo is on a whirlwind tour of Rioja and they’ve already started posting Rioja-related material on their site, including a guest post on Rioja from Australian wine blogger Dave Worthington of Tinto y Blanco, a terrific writer with a punchy, readable style and a way with tasting notes. And just today, a post on winemaker reactions to the notion of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ Rioja. I found the response given by Julio Sáenz of Bodegas La Rioja Alta insightful enough to excerpt here:

Gabriella contacted me last month to tell me that they were planning a trip to Rioja and to discuss ways she thought we might collaborate. I am vicariously along for the ride. Which reminds me, one of those collaborations was my own guest post on Catavino due tonight, so I’d better wrap this up.

Catavino will be be sending out a newsletter stuffed with information about their travels and the bodegas they visited in the coming weeks. Click here to sign up for it.

SINGLE OLIVE TREE, SINGLE VINEYARD: Jesus Madrazo’s Viña del Olivo at CVNE’s Viñedos de Contino, Laserna, Spain, September 13, 2007. Photo: José Guerra.

Late last week, an email newsletter from the East Village Spanish wine shop Tinto Fino alerted me to an article that recently appeared in The Wall Street Journal monthly, SmartMoney: “Is Spain the New Bordeaux?”.

James B. Stewart’s “SmartSpending” piece chronicles an informal blind tasting he recently organized in which wines from two top Bordeaux properties, Cheateau Pape Clement 2004 ($80) and Chateau Mouton Rothschild 2004 ($275), were tasted alongside a broad range of ten Spanish wines selected by Tinto Fino’s Mani Dawes, the idea being to test Spanish mettle against a category of French wine that’s quickly becoming a stand-in for both inflated pricing and a weak dollar.

“The results confounded our expectations,” Stewart writes. “Of the many tastings we’ve done, this was perhaps the most humbling — and enjoyable.” Once the panel determined their top four wines, the labels were revealed. Viñedos de Contino’s powerhouse Viña del Olivo Rioja 2001 was the overwhelming favorite: “We couldn’t get enough of this. We found its nose elegant and its taste rich, full, a bit tannic; it boasted a long, velvety finish. It won two votes as a Bordeaux, but others found it a little too extroverted to qualify. Though steep in price [$125 for a 750ml bottle], it’s still a bargain by first-growth-Bordeaux standards.”

Next came El Bugader Montsant 2004($63), followed by Valbuena Ribera del Duero 2001 ($125). Pape Clement, the panel’s number four pick, was the sole Bordeaux to place.

Admittedly, young wines from a problematic vintage* do not a great property define. One must also consider the fact that the instant Mr. Stewart decided to ask Ms. Dawes to select the Spanish entrants, France was at an immediate disadvantage; few in the business know Spanish wines like she does, and her palate judgments, if the wine selection at Tinto Fino is any indication, are impeccable.

Still, I suspect that this is not the last time we hear about the wine cognescenti looking south towards Spain for wines that offer stunning quality without the ‘dollar hangover.’

As Spanish winemakers keep ratcheting up quality and wine consumers continue to educate themselves about killer wines made south of the Pyrenees that won’t break the bank, new and established brands in Rioja and beyond will start looking sweeter and sweeter to serious wine collectors and consumers alike.

We very well could be at the beginning of a paradigm shift. In many ways Spain has already trumped France in the world of gastronomy. Could the world of wine be far behind?

*NOTE: After the exuberant New World drink-me-now ripeness that attended the hot vintage of 2003, 2004 in Bordeaux returned to what many have called a more classic style, which is to say, one that needs years in the bottle to develop. See Jancis Robinson’s lucid comments on the matter.

RIOJA MASTER CLASS: Chad Wilmouth of the Culinary Institute of America Greystone, left, records Jorge Muga’s introduction to the topography, soils, and microclimates of Rioja, on a roadside overlooking the Ebro valley near the town of Villalba de Rioja, Spain, September 10, 2007. The narrow gorges that demarcate the northwestern limit of Rioja viticulture, Las Conchas de Haro, are visible in the background. Photo: Jon Stamell.

It’s been really thrilling going through all of the footage John Barkley and Chad Wilmouth recorded while we were in Rioja last September; since I was always busy interviewing, I rarely took notes and felt afterwards somewhat detached from the material, that is, until I got a hold of all the interviews, in their entirety, in a series of DVDs John handed me in mid-December.

One of the most impressive and certainly the most comprehensive of those interviews was the interview, or rather series of interviews, I had with Bodegas Muga winemaker Jorge Muga. As I was taking notes watching the footage, I ended up transcribing maybe 75% to 80% of his comments, so wide in scope were the topics he covered, so detailed and easy to comprehend were the things he said. And while his focus was primarily on his family’s vineyards and his bodega’s wines, Mr. Muga had also a lot to say about the region as a single entity, as well as the soil and microclimatic variations of its constituent parts. I can’t wait to see it all integrated into the final DVD.

In the meantime, I finally got around to editing some of the audio that Chris Fleming made available to me over the summer, including over two hours of his own interview with Jorge Muga, discovering in the process that many of the topics covered in the DVD interviews are also dealt with in depth in the audio Chris captured at Bodegas Muga last spring. I remember Chris telling me how impressed he was with Sr Muga’s presentation, calling it “a master class in the viticulture of Rioja,” so it seems appropriate that we should begin with him.

Jorge Muga’s edited comments, tied together with some of my own brief commentary, comprise the first edition of the Rioja Podcast, linked below. I hope you find it worthwhile.

 

 Rioja Podcast 1: Jorge Muga at the Frontiers of Rioja: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (98)