Blame it on Rioja

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

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.

Click here to see a short video of Jose Valle in action.

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.

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.

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.

Elena Adell, winemaker at Bodegas Juan Alcorta in Logroño.

My colleague Kelly Bucher alerted me to an interesting article that appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. Entitled “The Ladies of Spain,” the piece profiles the growing preponderance of female winemakers and bodega proprietors in Spain, particularly true in the D.O. of Rías Baixas, located along Spain’s NW coast and famous for its fish and shellfish-friendly white wines based on the Albariño grape variety. According the article, women now run over half of the region’s 198 wineries.

“In famous regions like Rioja or Ribera del Duero,” one winemaker says, “Office politics are almost as important as talent, so you have to fight the old guard. In Rías Baixas everyone is young and open to change.”

Rías Baixas indeed has a very impressive record, but the story in Rioja is not so cut and dry.

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Next month marks the 10th anniversary of my first visit to Rioja, a trip I have written about before. In Madrid for the wedding of my two (still) great friends Julian and Marta in July 1998, my (still) great friend Valerie and I headed north for a visit to Bilbao, by way of a small village in La Rioja’s Tierra de Cameros called El Rasillo, where we stayed the night.

I don’t have a scanner, but recently, I took digital photographs of the photo album I put together after the wedding (and preceding trip to Bilbao), which held a bunch of receipts, maps, ripped out journal entries, etc. A short selection of these follows.

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The wine list at Rekondo, San Sebastián, September 17, 2007. Photo: Adrian Murcia.

Last week, a colleague of mine at Chanterelle, Gayle Dewindt–a biking Brooklynite most likely on a first-name basis with every purveyor of fine consumables in all five boroughs–brought into work a few slices of smoked duck breast from the Blue Ribbon Bakery Market, and shared it with the rest of the staff in between our first and second seating. It was so good, so perfectly seasoned, so satisfyingly smoky in a way that recalled both being inside Louie Mueller’s Barbecue in Taylor, Texas and smelling the first firewood smoke of the season in the autumns of my youth, that I did a little jig, a smoked duck gig.

Well that’s sort of how I felt this past September in San Sebastián when a very nice lady at Rekondo handed me the restaurant’s wine list. I had heard about this place from R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia managing director María José López de Heredia, who told me last year that the restaurant carried vintages of her family’s wines that she herself did not have in her own bodega. I had also read about it in an article by Jancis Robinson and in another article written by Gerry Dawes, but nothing had prepared me for the moment when I would actually be holding the restaurant’s wine list in my hands.

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Rioja Superstar: Jesus Madrazo of Contino, September 14, 2007. Photo: John Barkley.

During our second hot air balloon flight over Rioja, when we were up higher than we had any damn right to be, I noticed our pilot Laureano turning his ear toward the sounds of unseen aircraft in the distance with a slightly worried expression on his face. I thought to myself, man, that would really suck if we get clipped by a plane right now.

Which made our visit to Bodegas Contino in Laserna, the first appointment on our docket after our early-morning, high-altitude brush with eternity, a particularly sweet reaffirmation of life.

It’s hard to think of a better way to celebrate life than raising a glass of Contino. Jesus Madrazo, winemaker at Contino and a member of the family that founded CVNE, Contino’s parent company, is one of Rioja’s unmitigated superstars, and his wines are spectacular.

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