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.

Above Navaridas, Spain, September 13, 2007. Photo: John Barkley.

As we were planning our DVD on Rioja, it was important to me that we find a way to capture visually the remarkable topography of the region. My dream was somehow to enter the Ebro valley more or less the way I did when I first came to Rioja in 1998, from the south, down from the Tierra de Cameros. But I wanted to do it from the air, to get a sense of how the region is just completely surrounded by mountains, with a meandering river squiggling its way across the center of the valley.

We soon learned that a helicopter was just too expensive and an airplane was impractical. So the Consejo Regulador’s Ricardo Aguiriano and Rebeca Gómez, good sports both of them, arranged for a hot air balloon (globo in Spanish) to get us up and over the valley, so we could get our shots. John Barkley and I went up the first day; Chad and I on the second. (For the record, I was perfectly willing to pass on going up one or both times, but it was decided that I was needed up there to point out what to shoot and to communicate with our pilot, Laureano Casado).

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Zaha Hadid pavilion at López de Heredia, Haro, Spain. Photo courtesy Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia.

In my last post, I mentioned that I had had an epiphany in a North Carolina women’s shoe store without explaining what that epiphany was.

As I began typing my response to Lawrence Osborne’s Men’s Vogue article, “Final Harvest,” I realized I was heading into more serious territory, ran out of time, and decided to post a teaser, figuring I would add the rest later that day.

Well, my word count kept growing and my other life intervened, but I did manage to carve out some time today to flesh out my thoughts and edit out a significant chunk of what was threatening to become a small monograph on the subject.

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View from Finca Valpiedra, September 11, 2007

Tuesday, September 11, 2007
3:30pm
On the road to Cenicero

Lachlan Cox at Finca Valpiedra was admirably accommodating with us today, a big relief as logistics become harder and harder to juggle. I saw an opportunity to have both groups, production and sommelier, coincide at Valpiedra at 12:30 p.m. today, which is all well and good except for that fact I had to ask Cox if we could cut into his time with the sommeliers so that we could pull them out one by one and interview them on Valpiedra’s front patio, with the Ebro River in the foreground and the Sierra de Cantabria in the background.

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Sunday, September 9, 2007

Last night was the first team meeting that included all of the major players, held in a private room at Juan Nales’ Restaurante Las Duelas inside Hotel Los Agustinos. Ricardo Aguiriano, director of marketing at the Consejo Regulador de la Denominación de Origen Calificada de Rioja (CR), was there, along with Rebeca Gómez, head of international promotions for the CR; Tom Perry, head of the Rioja Exporters group; and, on our end, Jon Stamell, head of Vibrant Rioja campaign; Kelly Bucher of CRT/tanaka; John Barkley, associate director of strategic initiatives at CIA Greystone; Chad Wilmouth of CIA; and me.

It’s been crazy here in Haro, music and carrying on until the wee hours. Friday night, there was a wedding inside the hotel, in the courtyard below, and something that sounded like Iron Maiden coming from the town’s main square at about 2:00am, a bocadito of cacophony I found more amusing than obtrusive. I mean, who I am to complain? I am the interloper.

But the fiestas have meant that everything’s been closed since Friday afternoon, with nowhere to print and copy the schedules, except the front desk at our hotel, and that was like pulling teeth. One guy, a manager-type who looked and acted like he didn’t really like his job all that much, had warned me on Thursday night that they “were not set up to do big jobs.” And yesterday we exchanged words when I came down to pick up the schedules I had emailed down to a compliant receptionist a half hour earlier. “Remember what I told you?” he told me when I asked for the copies. That’s when I reminded him that we were bringing eleven people to this hotel and staying for six days, and that it was a little ridiculous that he was giving me a hard time over 70 sheets of paper. Ten minutes into our meeting, the schedules were delivered.

Today was a whirlwind day that began in Logroño, at the Fiesta de la Verdura, a festival that celebrates the harvest of all the killer fruits and vegetables that are cultivated in the region. It hasn’t been happening for all that long, according to Ricardo, and it’s sort of spin off of a major verdura fiesta that takes place in Calahorra further downriver, home to Chef Nino, who we are visiting later this week.

Today was set aside for exterior shots: bodegas facades, rivers, vineyards, etc. Man, it’s beautiful here. Temperature in the 70s, not a cloud in the sky, cool at night. In other words, perfect weather for the days leading up to the harvest. For the sake of the ’07 vintage (my vintage, in a way), I hope it stays this way.

Dinner at La Vieja Bodega in Casalrreina was very good. Three sommeliers arrived today, accompanied by the awesome Jose Guerra of Wines from Spain (ICEX): Skye LaTorre of A16 in San Francisco; Juan Gomez MS of the Breakers in Palm Beach Florida; and Jason Smith MS of Micheal Mina at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. They were a little beat after such a long travel day, but I liked their energy nevertheless. Good group so far.

Ángel Pérez Aguilar, the proprietor of La Vieja Bodega, opened the place just for us tonight, and he exhibited the kind of happiness in his life’s choices that I always dream about: he couldn’t take life in Madrid, and when he found this place, saw its underground cellar, well, he knew it was for him. He took us on a tour of those caves, showed us a wall of ancient bottles and pulled two 375ml bottles for us to taste, with barely legible labels that said: Monte Real, Blanco Semi-Dulce, 1954. Somewhat Sherry-like, with baked apple, faded floral, and hazelnutty aromas, the wine still had quite a lot of life. I never even knew such a wine existed here.

September 14, 2007

A little bit more about the project we call CIA Rioja 2007:  Jon Stamell, who heads the Vibrant Rioja campaign, has long held that a close association with the Culinary Institute of America would be a good thing, as it would offer us great exposure to influential industry types, keep us plugged into the annual Worlds of Flavor conference in Napa, and would tie our own upward growth to the CIA’s rapidly expanding international programming and new media initiatives.

Part of the plan was to develop a DVD video on Rioja, an educational documentary that would be mailed to thousands of alumni and would also permanently reside on the CIA’s prochef.com website, as part of the ProChef Discover series.  At the same time, we would recruit five emerging sommeliers from around the country to join us on the trip, and try to see the story of the region unfold through their eyes, try to capture that discovery on film.

That meant simultaneously creating the story—which is to say, create the setting and narrative organization of a story that would ultimately tell itself—and choosing the sommeliers, both duties I enthusiastically took on.

Working closely with freelancer Chris Fleming, a passionate and knowledgeable Riojaphile and the DVD’s technical adviser, I developed the story’s themes and cast of characters, submitted a schedule request for the week of shooting, and began compiling questions I would ask each winemaker or chef.  At the same time, I began the recruitment process for the sommeliers, which meant essentially checking in with Master Sommeliers Fred Dame, Larry Stone, and Roger Dagorn, and putting together a list of candidates, each of whom I would call in order to verify availability and try to get a sense of his or her personality. 

Early in the summer, Jon asked Kelly Bucher, who works for CRT/tanaka (the agency that administers the campaign) to work with me on these projects, and once the sommelier selections were made, she basically took over the logistics and liaison duties as they related to the sommeliers while I concentrated on the DVD script.

Kelly and I arrived a few days before shooting in order to check in with the Consejo Regulador of D.O.Ca. Rioja (our client) and visit as many bodegas as possible in order to let them know what to expect.

What I did not account for was that Haro would be deep in fiestas on the day we planned to shoot here, and that the shooting schedule I had created would lie somewhere between overly ambitious and utterly insane.

Stay tuned for more……

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.