Blame it on Rioja

Dutch Angle/Spanish Wine: (From left) ADM, photographer Nigel Barker, and Rebeca Gomez of Rioja’s Consejo Regulador, New York City, Wednesday, December 5, 2007. Photo: Kendyl Wright.

While admittedly not an avid television watcher, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t pretty damn cool to lead a Rioja tasting a few weeks ago at the studios of photographer Nigel Barker, a judge on the CW Network’s America’s Next Top Model.

Mr. Barker is a professed fan of Rioja and of pretty much all things Spanish, having lived in Spain for many years with his family, and he struck up a friendship with Vibrant Rioja’s Kendyl Wright during September’s Fashion Week, for which Rioja was the official wine. In the event, Kendyl arranged for a tasting at the photographer’s studio in the Meatpacking District in early December and asked me to lead it.

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If, like me, you had neither funds nor the foresight to attend the New York Wine Experience this weekend, you can get a taste of it at Tinto Fino in the East Village on Saturday, when the classy little Spanish-only wine shop hosts a “Meet and Taste” with Manuel Muga of Bodegas Muga and Jose Manuel Azofra of Sierra Cantabria, representatives of two key Rioja bodegas pouring their wines live and in person.

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One of the season’s chichiest wine events, the annual New York Wine Experience, spills out onto the carpeted terraces of the Marriott Marquis tomorrow night, inaugurating a three-day extravaganza of oenophilic excess set to the dulcet tones of Lite FM.

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Cristina Forner of Marqués de Cáceres (left)
and Rafael Vivanco of Bodegas Dinastía Vivanco

Tuesday, September 11, 2007
12:00 pm
On the road to Cenicero

Our post-interview tasting with Miguel Angel de Gregorio of Finca Allende in Briones was all too truncated. “It’s a shame you can’t stay,” De Gregorio told us as we said our goodbyes in the tower after having only tasted the Allende Blanco, “Because the wines will only keep getting better.” I believe him.

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As mentioned in my last post, I taught a class at Murray’s Cheese Greenwich Village on Tuesday, September 24, called Viva Rioja. Below is our lineup of wine and cheese:

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Author’s Note: My “Letters from Haro” series will resume on Friday, picking up where we left off last, on Tuesday afternoon, September 11. My notebook and laptop contain enough reflections, profiles, and images to keep “Letters” going for at least another month, but in the interest of brevity, coverage of my recent trip to Rioja should wrap up sometime next week. And although I have been back in the U.S. for over a week now, I will continue using the same title for the series, a nod to consistency and a reflection of the fact that much of what you will read was indeed written while I was still on the ground in Spain.

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The UK’s Decanter Magazine, hands down the most lucid, comprehensive, and intellectually rigorous wine magazine in English, takes on Rioja Reservas from the complicated 2002 vintage in its most recent panel tasting (September 2007, pp. 77-80). Expectations were low; after picture-perfect ripening conditions in the now-heralded 2001 vintage, 2002 served the region of a cocktail of spring frosts and excessive summer rains that threatened flowering and hampered ideal ripening of the fruit. Nevertheless, the six-member tasting panel emerged “pleasantly surprised.”

As lead taster and Rioja expert John Radford puts it, with typically inventive prose, “There were no really great, head-bangingly, mind-bogglingly fantastic wines, like there would have been if this had been 2001, 2004, or 2005, but overall the quality and value for money are still there - as well as the harmony you look for in Rioja.”

To call itself a Reserva, a Rioja is required by law to age for at least three years at the bodega, including at least one year in Bourdeax-style, 225-liter oak barrels (the most palpable legacy of Rioja’s close historical connection with its northern neighbor).

“Reserva has always had the cachet of being the ‘gold standard’ in Rioja,” Radford writes, “Perhaps not the best wines, but the most reliable.”

“I love the iron fist in the velvet glove you get with really good reservas,” Ed Adams, another panelist, writes, in a phrase often used to describe Pomerol, “Acidity and tannin, but wrapped in soft, velvety fruit.”

The panel tasted 54 wines and, as is the case with all Decanter panels, rated the wines on a twenty-point scale that put them into one of five categories, one to five stars. Of those 54 wines, 28 merited *** (Recommended, 14.5-16.49 pts.), four got **** (Highly Recommended, 16.5-18.49 pts.), and two wines, Bodegas Baigorri and Marqués de Riscal, won ***** (Decanter Award, Outstanding).

How funny that the panel, which tastes wine “blind” (meaning that they are tasted without the panelists’ knowing what they are judging), should award its highest rating to two wines that not only represent two ends of the style spectrum (Baigorri, which the panel describes as “modern, clean, and attractive…well structured modern style”; and Riscal, with “soft, strawberry fruit with spice and cedar…acidity and tannin to last,” descriptors of the classic style), but also come from two of the highest profile, so-called architectural bodegas.

Nice to see two exemplars of the happy union of both style and substance.

Bodegas Baigorri

Marqués de Riscal