Blame it on Rioja

From a 2008 food & wine-trend annual wrap-up that appeared online at (Washington) dcexaminer.com:

By Jeff Dufour
Examiner Columnist 12/30/08

WASHINGTON – This year might not have equaled 2007 in terms of food news, when Wolfgang Puck and Eric Ripert arrived on the crest of a wave that brought us a panoply of impressive new restaurants. But 2008 was no slouch of a year, either, bringing with it some terrific new concepts and fresh talent. Here’s a look at some of the trends that made the year in restaurants…

6. Spanish wine: Names like Rioja and Tempranillo have entered the lexicon of many diners and drinkers, as more and more bars are serving Iberian wines. Why? We asked John Wabeck, the sommelier at the forthcoming Inox in Tysons Corner. “The pricing still is reasonable, especially for the quality,” he said. “They tend to be a little more full-bodied than a lot of pinot noirs, but not as tannic and full-bodied as cabernet would be. They’re very good food wines.”

Leading a tasting for a group of 20 or 30-somethings, especially compared to ten or fifteen years ago, these days is a little like teaching literature to a bunch of former slackers who have in the intervening years finally realized that reading great books is not only NOT lame but also one of of life’s most edifying and endlessly renewable joys.

That broadening of sensibility and palate is doing wonders for the wine market, even in difficult times.  The $27 wine may have given way to the $11 wine four out of five nights for most consumers, young and old, but drinking they are most certainly doing.

And just as I have witnessed the growth of cheese sophistication and product recognizability in my ten-plus years working the boards of two of this country’s most accomplished cheese programs, so too I am seeing wine consumers grow increasingly less daunted by all those funny names, by those grapes they didn’t even existed the year before, by the ritual of accepting (and in some cases returning) a bottle opened tableside.  Pay a little attention, and there are rewards–social, gustatory, and even spiritual.

A on-going series devoted to finding tasty wines for less than $20

Barbara Werley MS, one of the five sommeliers who joined us earlier this year in Rioja, was recently part of a tasting panel convened the Dallas Morning News, which took a look at a bunch of wines paired next to cider-braised pork shoulder with carmelized onions.

“Our panel favorite was a citrusy chardonnay from New Mexico, surprisingly,” Tina Danze writes in her tasting report, which appeared last Thursday.  She continues, “Only one of four reds sampled had the right soft, fruity profile to mesh with the dish.”

That red turned out to be Marqués de Cáceres 2004 Rioja Crianza, a complex quaffable widely available across the country for less than $14 a bottle.

Here’s the panel’s write up:

Crianza isn’t a varietal; it’s a term referring to the amount of time a Spanish wine has been aged one year in oak, and another year in the bottle for those from the Rioja region. Made of 85 percent tempranillo, this wine’s ripe cherry, strawberry and raspberry flavors laced with cinnamon notes proved an ideal partner for the pork. “It’s simple, soft and fruity, with no bitter finish,” said Barbara Werley. “It’s the best of the reds [sampled].” James Tidwell noted that unlike other reds, it’s “not gushy-fruity, not bubble gummy grape-y. It’s ripe pure fruit without a lot of oak.” Blythe Beck liked the way the wine “meshes well with the fat” in the pork and the mashed potatoes. George Howald hailed this as “a balanced wine that integrates nicely with the dish.”

With a little nosing around online–the Pro version of www.wine-searcher.com also helps, a bargain at $29.95 a year–one could score bottles of the ‘04 Cáceres for quite a bit less than the $18.99 list price mentioned in the DMN piece. In fact, one of the lowest prices I found was right here in NYC: $10.99 a bottle at 67 Wine & Spirits in good ole Manahatta.

Like the airing of Christmas music before Thanksgiving or a major newspaper’s rating of a restaurant a mere four weeks after opening (unheard of in Ruth Reichl’s day at the NY Times), Best of 2008 lists seem to be arriving earlier and earlier these days.  

Just out earlier this week, is the Wine Spectator’s 2008 Top 100, with a full report available online.

Of the six Spanish wines selected by the editors of the esteemed (and in some circles, controversial) U.S. wine magazine, three carry the D.O.Ca. Rioja back label: Bodegas LAN 2004 Rioja Reserva (#52), Bodegas Muga 2004 Rioja Reserva (#65), and Sierra Cantabria Rioja Crianza 2004 (#71).

Nineteen wines, nearly a fifth of those on the list, retail for $20 or less, good news for point followers on a budget. The LAN Reserva retails for around $17; the Sierra Cantabria for $20; the Muga Reserva is about $30.

Which means that, among Rioja representatives, that value percentage jumps to two thirds.

It is also very interesting to note that two of the three Rioja wines on the list (Muga and Sierra Cantabria) are explicitly ‘classic’ expressions of Rioja, relatively long aging in American oak, cigar box aromas, pronounced earthiness, etc. At a time when the extracted modern style, with French oak aging, super-concentrated fruit, early release, etc., continues its commercial ascent, it’s curious that one of the publications most responsible for that trend is now bucking it slightly.

TO: Christmas Wines

FROM: UK Telegraph

RE: Be Yourself!

An ongoing series dedicated to finding tasty and distinctive Rioja wines for less than $20

It’s a particularly British thing to use notions of class when describing wine, but I really love the metaphor used by the London Telegraph over the weekend in an article entitled, “Wines for Christmas: Drink Up and Don’t Break the Bank” (Do any American newspapers ever refer to this time of year as Christmas anymore?):

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The other night at Barcelona Restaurant in Greenwich, CT, I found two more wines to add to our growing list of Rioja wines that retail for less than $20 and also deliver great value.

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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?

In yet another sign that appreciation for “traditional” wines is hitting the mainstream, this week’s ‘Wines for the Weekend’ column on Forbes.com, entitled “Wines Columbus Would Drink,” features two classic-style wines–one from Italy, the other from Spain–going head-to-head for the holiday.

Tyler Colman, a.k.a. Dr. Vino, came up with the match-up (and a few other minor bouts), which pits a 2003 Barolo from Giuseppe Mascarello with a 1999 Rioja Reserva from the house of R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia. Eric Arnold is the author.

The keywords for both wines: ‘light,’ ‘delicate,’ and ‘age.’ Preference is a subjective matter.

Click here to see a short video related to the taste off.