Blame it on Rioja

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.

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.

Welcome to BLAME IT ON RIOJA, a new wine blog dedicated exclusively to Spain’s premier quality winemaking region—its products, personalities, landscape, and history.

Uncork a Rioja crianza, let the fruity and seductive Tempranillo grape nudge your senses, and join me on an insider’s tour of one of the world’s richest epicurean enclaves.

Commisioned by the region itself, BLAME IT ON RIOJA is nevertheless a highly personal enterprise: a practical guide to a region in flux as seen through the eyes of a working sommelier, opinionated journalist, and unreformed lifetime Riojaphile.

About that last part, allow me a moment to elaborate.

I’ve nurtured an obsession for Rioja wines since my days as a student in Madrid in the early 1990s, but it took an impromptu detour to Rioja in the late 1990s to seal the deal.

Over a plate of wild partridge and a glass of young Rioja in the summer of 1998, my food and wine worldview would be rocked forever. (more…)