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.

Apart from Violeta’s transfer to Williamsburg and some badly-needed friend and family summer reconnection/outdoor feasting, much of my time away from the restaurant lately has been spent working on a couple of Rioja-sponsored projects: a sommelier trip to the region and an educational DVD/webcast on Rioja, co-produced by the James Beard Award winning team at the Culinary Institute of America Greystone in Napa (about which projects, more in future posts).

John Barkley, a key member of that team, alerted me to the fact late last week that Pancho Campo of the Spanish Wine Academy, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the effects of global warming on the wine industry, would be visiting Greystone on Friday. We promptly made arrangements for an interview.

So, it was rather serendipitous that I should open my inbox today to find that my friend Valerie had sent me a link to an National Public Radio report on global warming and wine, which included Sr. Campo as a major source.

Besides being a good introduction to the subject, the piece also sheds some interesting light on the role of elevation in wine production, the realities of vintage variation in traditional French wine production, and the evolving tastes of the modern-day wine consumer.

Click here for a link.

Chris Fleming, a freelance wine writer who works at Frederick Wildman & Sons (a fine wine importer) and who worked for a time at the Spanish wine-crazy retailer PJ Wine in Upper Manhattan, is doubtless one of the most knowledgeable and eloquent wine professionals I have come across in recent years. Chris has a particular passion for Spanish wines, and he recently published an in-depth look at a broad spectrum of Rioja wineries he has visited in the pages of www.winereviewonline.com entitled, “Rioja Renaissance: Six Exemplary Bodegas.”

Chris is a particularly keen observer of the fascinating interplay between old and new in contemporary Rioja (clearly one of my own obsessions), and presents here an excellent study of how the quintessentially French notion of terroir (terruno in Spanish)–the effects of soil, microclimate, topography, orientation to the sun, etc., on the quality of a given plot of vines–has influenced a new generation of winemakers in Rioja, this in a region where bodegas have historically sourced grapes from multiple growers in all three subzones to make a single bottling.

His profiles of RODA, Finca Allende, CVNE, R. Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia, Miguel Merino and Valenciso are likely to pique the interest of specialists and knowledge-hungry wine novices alike, offering as it does a lucid snapshot of what CVNE’s Jesus Madrazo calls in the article “the most exciting time I’ve ever seen in Rioja.”

Wine and cheese have long enjoyed a harmonious relationship. For centuries, they have figured prominently into the national diets of France, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, evolving into a rich and varied mosaic of local traditions, each making the most of what was available close by. It makes sense that a cheese maker would want to make something that would taste good with the wine produced down the road, and vice versa; a phenomenon that led to the expression, “What grows together, goes together”: the main reason why Albariño goes so well with Tetilla.

Every so often, though, it’s fun to cross regional or national borders to find wine and cheese matches so tasty you’re liable to let out a grunt or sigh or whatever you do when you’ve tasted something totally up your gastro-alley.

A year and a half ago, I found such a match, and I recently tasted it again to see if it still stood up. It did. The pairing in question: Queso de la Garrotxa, a sweet and fragrant goat’s milk cheese from the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees and an unusual white wine from Remelluri in the Rioja Alavesa. (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.