Blame it on Rioja

Rioja and Ribs: A Seattle Pairing, August 2008

Market nerves and tight belts demand a heightened sense of watchfulness when it comes to wine dollar allocations these days. In that spirit, I’ve been on the lookout lately for Riojas with a high bang-to-buck ratio. There’s lots out there. History, climate, tradition, investment–there are a lot of reasons why Rioja offers great value. In the coming weeks, I’d like to share some of the region’s best values in these pages.

The first one that comes to mind is Bodegas LAN’s 2001 Reserva, a bottle of which I picked up at a Seattle supermarket while visiting the family of my girlfriend’s brother, Howie, two months ago. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and we had picked up spicy pork ribs, beef brisket, and hot links from Jones Barbecue in Mt. Baker for a casual outdoor dinner in Howie’s backyard.

Wine for these sorts of occasions should be approachable but not flabby or facile; they should have good acidity and tannic structure but shouldn’t scream those traits out. The key is integration of components; and this wine is benchmark Rioja in this sense. All of its constituent elements are in harmony; easy enough to drink but with a finish that lingers. It’s juicy and jammy enough to hold its own with spicy barbecue sauce, but has delicate enough aromas and flavors to make it worthy of sensual consideration on its own merits. I other words, it doesn’t need food per se, but it sure loves it.

I haven’t always loved LAN, and just recently I discovered that, beginning with the 2001 vintage, LAN has added Graciano to its reserva blend of Tempranillo, Mazuelo, and Garnacha. Whether this was the decisive move for my palate I cannot say for sure. But I can say that this wine rocks. Howie and company concurred.

And for a price tag of around $17, it rocks the Casbah.

Bodegas LAN 2001 Reserva is available at K&L Wine Merchants in Redwood City, CA for $15.99

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.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

In the midst of pretty intense renovations, Bodegas Olarra, a big operation located not from Logroño, nevertheless still exudes a particular brand of 1970s lounge ennui/cool (for me, a feel most perfectly captured by Manfred Mann Earth Band’s 1976 cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light”), especially true for the interior design the tasting room. Which makes sense, since the bodega was founded in 1972.

The wines here really took the group by surprise. It’s our first tasting today; we’re swirling glasses by 10:00 am. We’ve just toured this sprawling estate, and we’re sampling wines in a room that could pass for a Kubrick set, and…most of the line up we taste today is delicious and full of personality.

Since the bodega was founded in the 1970s, it’s unsurprising that American oak predominates here. Olarra’s Cerro Anon 2004 Crianza (82% Temranillo, the with the remainder made up of Viura, Grenache, Mazuelo, and Graciano) has an exceptional balance of fruit, acidity, and tannins. It’s juicy and thirst-quenching. On the modern end, I found the Summa 2001 Reserva a little too cherry bright for my taste, but a modern wine from Olarra’s sister bodega, Ondarre (which sources fruit exclusively from the nearby Rioja Baja village of Viana, in Navarra), the 2001 Mayor de Ondarre Reserva takes a subtler approach. The tannins are firm but the aromas–red fruit, baking spices, an earthy component–make you want to linger a bit longer.

On the way out, David Rosengarten, who, I am beginning to learn, is especially skilled as using his charm to get a little something extra out each situation without seeming overbearing, asks if by any chance there might be an older bottle of wine we could all taste. A few minutes later, our host Cándido Latorre shows up with a 1973 Olarra Gran Reserva. As expected, the wine offers all those tertiary aromas that makes fans of classic Rioja swoon (leather, faded roses, a faint toasty character). We leave quite pleased.

Next up is Sierra Cantabria, operated by the fifth generation of the Eguren family. After touring the family’s stunning Viñedos de Páganos property in the town of Páganos, where the Egurens are also planning to build a hotel and restaurant overlooking the La Nieta vineyard, we head to San Vicente de la Sonsierra to see the group’s Señorío de San Vicente bodgea and taste a selection of all of the family’s properties.

I’ve always liked the Sierra Cantabria line, the group’s classic brand, and I happen to love their most recent Gran Reserva release, from the 2001 vintage. I am not thinking that our group will unanimously swoon over their modern lineup, since I know that there are more than a few in our group who might find the style of these wines a little jacked up for Rioja.

But as we taste, eyebrows raise, including mine. A barrel sample of the 2005 Sierra Cantabria Cuveé Especial (6 months in combination of French and American oak, followed by 4 months in new French oak barrels), which our host José Manuel Azofra calls a transition our traditional wines to our terroir wines, has coffee, smoked meaty, licorice, minerally character with lots of perfume–all of which might sound a little an odd combo or how a nightmare date would smell–but I really liked this wine. A lot.

The 2005 San Vicente, 100% Tempranillo Peludo from a single 26 hectare plot in the Sonsierra zone of Rioja Alavesa, has just an incredible nose. Wow. Herbal notes, again licorice. Some might find the pronounced ripeness, even sweetness, of this wine a little much, but this is by far the best San Vicente I have tasted to date.

And then there’s the 2005 El Puntido from the aforementioned Viñedos de Páganos, a wine with a little less sweetness on the palate than the San Vicente, spicy, tannic, with high fruit notes (like an underripe black plum?); the 2006 Finca El Bosque, super-floral and perfumed; and the 2005 Amancio, with aromas of black fruit, violets and super, super-ripe fruit and ripe tannins on the palate.

It’s a sign of the style that predominates here that the bathrooms off the tasting room at Señorío de San Vicente have available little plastic packets with single-use toothbrushes and toothpaste inside them, so that tasters can brush off all that extracted pigment before moving on to their next appointment.

These wines are not for everyone (it’s not just style we’re talking here; the wines at the higher end are very expensive). But they are stunning: expressive, complex, and, yes, site-specific. It may be a little unwise to drink one of these wines before sitting for a color portrait, but man, they’ve got some life in them.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

After yesterday’s light but persistent rain, we are all happy to see sunny skies again today. From what I am gathering, a little rain this time of year is not catastrophic, especially this year, which was quite dry. Harvest is still two weeks away for most vineyards in Rioja Alta and Rioja Alavesa, so there is time for the soils to bounce back, although I keep thinking about what Jorge Muga said about his bodega’s high elevation clay soils during our interview last year.

“The problem with clay is that it keeps the water too much. If it rains a lot in September, forget about the harvest.”

Marqués de Vargas
Our first stop, a single estate winery just outside of Logroño, in an area known as Los Tres Marqueses, for the large holdings of land here originally held by three distinguished marquis: Vargas, Murrieta, and Romeral (the last property of which I am told has been broken up, though I have noticed that the brand lives on, bottled by the bodega giant, AGE). On our brief tour of the 70-hectare Marqués de Vargas property, in fact, I notice that Marqués de Murrieta is right next door.

Although the inclusion of Cabernet Sauvignon in blends here is not advertised (it is referred to in materials here as “other varieties”), it’s abundantly clear that the property has considerable “grandfathered” plantings of that French variety.

I have tasted Vargas’ wines before and have quite liked them, but today I am still quite taken aback by their wines’ high level of quality and distinctiveness. Careful grape selection and handling, along with spare-no-expense winemaking, are likely the keys here to the wines’ deliciousness, but so too is the interesting fact that the winery uses a lot of Russian oak.

I was a little at a loss to describe the aromas of the one wine here that uses all new Russian oak, the 2004 Marqués de Vargas Reserva Privada–aromatic green herbs? a pencil lead-like minerality?–but I do know that I really liked it. Winemaker Javier Pérez Ruiz de Vergara called the aromas of Russian oak floral and feminine, saying that women tend to like this wine. David Rosengarten, who said that he picked up a lot of vegetal character in the wine, guessed that it had more to do with the 20% Cabernet Sauvignon in the blend.

Dinastía Vivanco
For years, the wines of this bodega, based in the Rioja Alta town of Briones and now managed by the Vivanco family’s fourth generation, played second fiddle to its terrific–and, I might add, non-self promotional–Museum of Wine Culture. I am pleased to say that this is no longer the case.

Winemaker Rafael Vivanco, who graduated two years ago with a Diplôme National d’Oenologie from the University of Bordeaux, is as kind and unassuming as he is influential. He’s also recently made some killer wines. I’d like to spend some more time in the future writing about the entire lineup we tasted today, a portfolio slowly making inroads in the American market, but for now, as an expample, let me say that Rafael’s latest blanco release, from the 2006 vintage, took everyone by surprise. Sourced from the best Viura plantings Rafael could find and kept on its lees for several months, the 2006 Dinastía Vivanco Blanco is as vibrant a white wine you’re likely to find anywhere in Rioja. With correct tree-fruit aromatics and a hint of citrus on the nose, the wine gives no hint to the mouth-watering acidity that hits the tongue on first taste.

“Other whites in Rioja are less acidic and focus more on the oak,” Rafael says. “Natural acidity is very important to me.”

Bodegas Franco-Españolas
Not so long ago, vineyards north of Logroño crept right up to the Ebro River, a stone’s throw from the city center. That was exactly the case at this venerable old bodega just down the street from the town’s former slaughterhouse. Inside you’ll find old photographs of the vineyards that once grew behind the bodega’s late 19th century structure, where now apartment buildings stand.

And speaking of photographs, found out today that back in the early 1950s, the city’s official photographer took images of Ernest Hemingway in front of this very bodega, while the author was traveling up to Pamplona in the company of bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez. Lost for half a century, these images were recently discovered by the photographer’s son in his father’s cellar, and he generously handed them over to the winery. The one that appears here shows Hemingway arm in arm with one the bodega’s floor sweepers. Story goes that the American writer was quite charmed that this gentleman happened to be wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

Jesus Madrazo (far right), winemaker at Contino, conducting a tasting of his single estate’s wines with group of sommeliers from the U.S. (left to right), Jason Smith MS, Juan Gómez MS, Theresa Paopao (back to camera) and Skye Latorre. Madrazo is one of Rioja’s most eloquent advocates of Graciano. Photo: Kelly Bucher.

The pun most often heard in Rioja concerns the Graciano grape variety.

Rioja reds are allowed to have Tempranillo, Garnacha, Mazuelo, and Graciano in their blend. Tempranillo, of course, rules the region’s roost. There is also a considerable amount of Garnacha planted, especially in Rioja Baja. Mazuelo and Graciano combined make up less than 5% of all plantings, with Graciano making up a little over 1% of Rioja’s total vineyard.

Notoriously hard to grow, highly susceptible to diseases, and largely low yielding, Graciano has reputation problem. So much so that wine growers will tell you,

“Graciano? Gracias, no.”

But based on recent travels and conversations with winemakers who looking closely at their vines and their wines, Graciano, even in its tiny representation, is a critical part of the equation.

(more…)

It’s one of those questions that has troubled me for as long as I can remember: when describing a single grape type–Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon, for example–is “grape varietal” synonymous with “grape variety”?

In other words, is it correct for me to say or write, “Tempranillo is the dominant black grape varietal in Rioja”?

No, says Jancis Robinson MW, in a recent post on Catavino.

“They are used interchangeably - but wrongly!” Ms. Robinson says in a follow-up comment to a Catavino interview conducted two weeks ago in Barcelona.

“Variety is the noun and applies to plants and vines,” she explains in a clarification sent to Catavino’s Gabriella Opaz via Blackberry. “Varietal is an adjective that can be applied to wines named after the variety from which it was made! Sorry to fuss but it would be useful to keep these two terms distinct.”

Usage distinctions like these, which help writers and public speakers think more carefully about language (and potentially steer clear of public embarrassment), might be very English, but they ain’t fussy.

So here’s to you, Ms. Robinson: rock on varietally.

RIOJA MASTER CLASS: Chad Wilmouth of the Culinary Institute of America Greystone, left, records Jorge Muga’s introduction to the topography, soils, and microclimates of Rioja, on a roadside overlooking the Ebro valley near the town of Villalba de Rioja, Spain, September 10, 2007. The narrow gorges that demarcate the northwestern limit of Rioja viticulture, Las Conchas de Haro, are visible in the background. Photo: Jon Stamell.

It’s been really thrilling going through all of the footage John Barkley and Chad Wilmouth recorded while we were in Rioja last September; since I was always busy interviewing, I rarely took notes and felt afterwards somewhat detached from the material, that is, until I got a hold of all the interviews, in their entirety, in a series of DVDs John handed me in mid-December.

One of the most impressive and certainly the most comprehensive of those interviews was the interview, or rather series of interviews, I had with Bodegas Muga winemaker Jorge Muga. As I was taking notes watching the footage, I ended up transcribing maybe 75% to 80% of his comments, so wide in scope were the topics he covered, so detailed and easy to comprehend were the things he said. And while his focus was primarily on his family’s vineyards and his bodega’s wines, Mr. Muga had also a lot to say about the region as a single entity, as well as the soil and microclimatic variations of its constituent parts. I can’t wait to see it all integrated into the final DVD.

In the meantime, I finally got around to editing some of the audio that Chris Fleming made available to me over the summer, including over two hours of his own interview with Jorge Muga, discovering in the process that many of the topics covered in the DVD interviews are also dealt with in depth in the audio Chris captured at Bodegas Muga last spring. I remember Chris telling me how impressed he was with Sr Muga’s presentation, calling it “a master class in the viticulture of Rioja,” so it seems appropriate that we should begin with him.

Jorge Muga’s edited comments, tied together with some of my own brief commentary, comprise the first edition of the Rioja Podcast, linked below. I hope you find it worthwhile.