Blame it on Rioja

Fast forward to the 19th century, when phylloxera decmates the vineyards of France and panicked negotiants from Bordeaux, fearing the sudden loss of their overseas markets, look south for salvation. Modern Rioja is born.

Along the way, pioneering bodegueros discover that some barrels are aging with enviable grace. Thus, the Gran Reserva is born.

Check out part two of Doug Frost MS, MW’s introduction to Rioja last month at CIA Greystone in Napa. We are just about to get to our first wine, López de Heredia Viña Tondonia Blanco Gran Reserva 1981.

Stay tuned.

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?

He doesn’t know it yet, but José Valle is about to become my uncle.

I’m not sure exactly what’s involved in transatlantic avuncular adoption, but I’ll get that sorted out. First let me tell you why I want him to be my uncle.

José Valle is a retired Riojano from Logroño who, like a lot of residents of La Rioja’s capital, owns property in the countryside, in this case a three-room casita, or little house, near the town of Albarite, close to the banks of the Río Iregua, one of the Ebro’s major tributaries. Behind the house, occupying a a full three quarters of the property is his huerta, or vegetable garden.

Just two weeks ago, on our last day in the region, Sr. Valle cooked for our group of visiting sommeliers and journalists a memorable meal consisting of baby lamb chops, pork ribs, and sausages grilled over sarmientos, or grape vine cuttings, served with a salad of vegetables largely sourced from his back yard. To go with it, a line-up of wines supplied by the Consejo Regulador of Rioja.

I have been to Rioja four times in the last two years and have been the grateful beneficiary of some of Rioja’s most accomplished cocina. Whether classic or cutting edge, Rioja’s restaurants are the both keepers of the region’s fine gastronomic tradition and practitioners of its extraordinary hospitality. But there’s something about the intimacy of dining in someone’s home that is hard to top. And when your host is a charming fellow who not only raises your vegetables and skillfully grills your lamb chops but also makes the pacharan that you enjoy as a digestif (from sloe berries in his garden)–well, let’s just say that for many of us on the trip, myself included, this was the high point of the entire week.

José Valle in the garden of his home near Alberite, Spain.

At one point, I looked around, and the whole room was abuzz with animated conversation. Despite the fact that we were all kind of scrunched in around one long table, our elbows in each other’s feeding strike zones, a sense of well-being and the most basic comfort imaginable pervaded the room. Where just an hour earlier an unseasonably cold northern wind and the effects of having traversed the lower Ebro valley twice before lunch, were taking their toll on our group’s collective disposition, here we were now enjoying a meal none of us will soon forget.

“Of course, in Rioja it’s customary at this point to enjoy a siesta,” José’s son Oscar Valle announced to all of us as our meal drew to a close, “But seeing as how we have only two rooms, that might be a little complicated.”

Truthfully, I didn’t want to leave. Ever.

“When I am here, in front of the grill, cooking for big group like this, that’s when I am happiest,” José said to my colleague Rebeca Gómez as we were walking out.

I think I can understand why.

Photo credit: Gretchen Thomas

Friday, September 12, 2008

Absolutely gorgeous morning in Rioja today, a little cold even, as we arrive to our first destination, Bodegas Fernando Remírez de Ganuza in Sanmaniego, a town in the Rioja Alavesa nestled right up under the Sierra de Cantabria mountains . The winery is just off the town’s main square, an impeccably clean and eminently modern facility cloaked in traditional garb, the kind of place that I imagine a lot of people conjure up when they imagine owning a bodega in Rioja. Most but not all of the winery’s vineyards are on a southward-facing slope just below the town, a stone’s throw from the bodega. The soil here is limestone and clay; elevation between 550 and 600 meters above sea level.

Export manager Luis Alberto greets us and is quite amenable to our suggestion that we begin with a tasting of the wines before continuing with the tour. Too often we’ve found ourselves hurrying through tastings after being led a lengthy tour, and knowing that our day booked solid, I’m determined to keep us on schedule.

Wine writer Gerry Dawes introduced me to the notion of certain modern Rioja winemakers’ having classic palates, and I think Fernando Remírez de Ganuza is one of them. I also think that these are the kind of wines that show better with some bottle age. The bodega’s now scarce 2001 Reserva, a wine we used to carry at Chanterellle and which I sampled again recently at a Tempranillo, Inc. tasting in New York, is a superlative Rioja, balanced, elegant, possessing heft for sure but so delicately structured, so remarkably alive with acidity, so aromatically dazzling, that I was half-tempted to buy a magnum of it for lunch.

The 2004 Reserva (90% Tempranillo, 10% Graciano; with 2 years in all new oak, 80% French and 20% American) on the other hand, while aromatically enticing (red fruit, violets, baking spices, and tar), struck me as a little young, a bit muted. I don’t expect that to be the case in a couple of years’ time. The bodega’s 2005 Trasnocho was a real eye-opener. Press wine is what you could call “squeeze wine,” the dense and extremely tannic result taking what’s left in the fermentation tank after the free-run juice is siphoned off and squeezing the hell out of it. Winemakers then typically add small amounts of this to their barrels, using it almost like a seasoning.

Not here. Using a method of his own design, Sr. Remírez de Ganuza drops a plastic membrane into his tanks and fills it slowly with warm water, gently pressing the contents for 24 hours (it used to be done in half the time, overnight, hence the name), so as not to extract the harsh and bitter tannins from the pips.

With 20 months in new French oak barrels and 12 in bottle before release, the Trasnocho is still quite tannic and certainly not your typical Rioja. It’s a beautiful wine nevertheless-very dense, very pretty, herbaceous, mouth-watering. It’s also unavailable in the U.S. market and, unsurprisingly, made in very small quantities.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Into the Upper Ebro Basin

To enter Rioja by car from the northwest, there are two ways you can go: the A-68 (an autopista, or expressway, a toll road), which passes just below an enormous hilltop statue of San Felices (patron Saint of Haro and guardian of the vineyards) before dipping into the Ebro Valley; or, the N-124 (a carretera nacional, or highway), which follows the course of the Rio Ebro towards a narrow gorge called the Conchas de Haro before plunging into a tunnel hollowed out through the limestone massif that forms Rioja’s “northern wall,” as RODA’s Agustín Santolaya calls the region’s chain of northern sierras.

Both are dramatic ways to see Rioja for the first time.

One minute you’re driving through a landscape of wheat fields and forests under cloudy skies fed by the Atlantic Ocean, and then, almost before you can blink, boom!: You’re under blue Mediterranean skies gawking at a stunning panorama of almost nothing but vineyards stretching down into the upper Ebro basin as far as the eye can see.

Tondonia
Our first visit, 10:30 a.m. In retrospect, I wish we had scheduled this visit a little later in the week. This is the visit most anticipated by our group, and it’s over way too fast. Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia, where everything is done more or less the same way it has been for decades, is presently in the midst of a great flowering of recognition and praise, particularly among journalists and sommeliers.

Winemaker Mercedes López de Heredia recognizes me from last year’s interview and I’m quite flattered. Our tasting takes place in the bodega’s cobweb-strewn 19th century bottle cemetery. The whites, all Gran Reservas and all from the Tondonia vineyard, are all astonishing and change in the glass as we taste.

“We can guess, based on the weather conditions, tasting the wine as it ages in the barrel, how a wine will develop in the bottle,” Mercedes tells us. “But for the most part, we don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

The 1970 Blanco has searing acidity and shows remarkable potential to age even more. The 1976 is the most developed of the bunch; its aromas sweet and seductive, a little reminiscent of agua de panela, a raw sugar cane-based hot beverage popular among Colombia’s working class. Twenty minutes later the ‘76 smells like toffee. Remarkable. The 1964 is somewhere in between the ‘70 and ‘76: still very much alive but with all the hallmarks of graceful aging. The 1981, the bodega’s most recent Gran Reserva release, is a little tight at first, and seems positively childish compared to the others. Never thought I’d call a wine from 1981 young.

Viña Real
CVNE has a trifecta of killer properties in Rioja. Imperial is based in Haro, is made entirely from Rioja Alta fruit, and is the most classically styled of the three labels. Viña Real is all Alavesa fruit and comes from one of the region’s most impressive wineries, a gravity-fed, amphitheater-like bodega with barrels rooms that were excavated deep inside the sandstone mountain. And then there is Contino, a terrific single-estate property in nearby Laserna managed by the affable Jesus Madrazo.

In our visit to Viña Real, hosted by José Luis Ripa, we taste wines from all three bodegas. The 2005 Viña Real Crianza has pretty strawberry fruit and a licorice/tar-like spicy mineral character on the nose. The 2001 Viña Real Reserva has aromas of sweet red fruit, moderate alcohol levels considering the ripeness of the year, and excellent length. The Contino 2004 Reserva, with a high proportion of Graciano, has great aromatic complexity on the nose (along with a noticeable whiff of alcohol, which I hadn’t noticed in Reserva’s from earlier vintages). My favorite of the bunch is the 2001 Imperial Reserva, with focused but subdued fruit, a small dose of tobacco pouch-like earthiness, and excellent balance.

I love maps. In fact, I think one of the main reasons why I love acquiring wine and cheese knowledge by the bucketful is the simple fact that a big portion of this activity involves gazing at maps.

Is it a guy thing? Is it some instinctive primordial tendency toward orienting?

Whatever it is, I love it.

Which is why I was quite stoked to learn from my friends over at Catavino that the DeLong Wine Company, the folks behind the ingenious and also-great-to-gaze-upon-for-hours Wine Grape Varietal Table, have recently released a Wine Map of the Iberian Peninsula.

One of DeLong’s gifts is their ability to present a ton of information visually in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the brain’s capacity to process it. I like that in a map because every time you come back to it, you find something new. Who knew, for example, that Rioja lies more or less on the same latitude as the Finger Lakes of New York State (42.41 N)?

The Wine Map of the Iberian Peninsula is available for purchase online for $29.95 plus shipping. Please Note: Orders will sent out beginning September 21.