Blame it on Rioja

Only three more days till the eating event of the year, and like lots of folks this fall, I’m staying put, cooking with Lily and Gail across the river in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with Mom and Dad coming in Thursday morning for the day’s festivities, plus an extended weekend involving a good amount of walking and probably more eating and drinking.

But let’s focus here. Thanksgiving.

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Microclimatically speaking, traversing Rioja is a little like exploring San Francisco: one minute you’re shrouded in fog, a maritime chill working its way into your shuddering bones; but drive a few kilometers and you suddenly find yourself bathed in sunlight under azure skies and a dry wind.

Three major climate patterns-Atlantic, Continental, and Mediterranean-converge over much of Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa, but the subzone of Rioja Baja is pure Mediterranean: dry, hot, and great for fruit (Garnacha) with high potential alcohol.

As we’ve seen, historically speaking Rioja is a blended wine–a mix of grape varieties supplied by many growers working all three subzones. This practice has been a gold mine for bodegas banking on consistency year in and year out, and helps explain why even entry-level Rioja tends to be so damn quaffable: what one subzone lacks a given year, another can usually step in to keep the house style in play.

And of those three subzones, Rioja Baja has developed a reputation more as a supplier than a producer, Rioja’s country cousin in a sense, with only a handful of bodegas, (including most famously, Palacios Remondo, owned by the family of Priorat pioneer Alvaro Palacios).

That’s beginning to change, and as wine columnist Ernie Whalley pointed out recently in The Irish Independent, Baron de Ley, a single estate established at a medieval monastery near the town of Mendavia in the mid-eighties at a monastery, has led the way:

“When Gonzalo Rodriguez, the chief winemaker, was recruited by [Baron de Ley] to work in Rioja Baja, his friends laughed and said: ‘Ah, you’re going to Africa!’ No one is laughing now. Lately, Rioja Baja has come into its own, bucked by a sea change in winemaking styles that now favours expressive fruit-driven reds. It’s marketing-led, of course, with a flutter of lashes, and a hitch of the skirt to catch the eye of influential critics such as American guru Robert Parker and his acolytes.”

One side effect of the Baja boom is that a good deal of the subzone’s Garnacha vines (I’d like to find an exact amount) has been uprooted and replanted with Tempranillo, a move which seems to make sense from a business model but has horrified others, like Bodegas Muga’s Jorge Muga, who sings the praises of Rioja Baja’s old Garnacha vines, and the ever-contrarian Gerry Dawes, who wonders why, if Priorat has risen to international stardom with the great old-vines Garnacha in a similar climate, should Baja be planted with a grape that does better in cooler areas?