Blame it on Rioja

James Oliver Cury, executive editor of Epicurious.com, wrote in his Epi-log blog recently, wondering, “When will wine prices go down?” It seems like in recessionary times everyone is looking for good values, and it’s been a mission of mine to track down what Rioja has to offer in that vein.

With Thanksgiving fast approaching, I wanted to write a little bit about a feast-friendly wine called Seis de Luberri 2006 from winemaker Florentino Martinez Monje. This is classic Rioja Alavesa, with a modern focus. Made from 100% Tempranillo, Seis is stainless steel fermented, then aged for six months in French and American oak (hence the name, “Seis,” which is Spanish for six). It’s a super jammy wine, with strong notes of raspberries and strawberries and a great background of spicy wood tones. This is technically considered a Joven, since by law Crianzas must be aged at least twelve months in oak, but it’s definitely one of the most complex ‘quaffables’ I’ve encountered from Rioja, ever.

It’s imported here by Andre Tamers at De Maison Selections, an under-the-radar importer of French and Spanish wines who has one of the top palates in the business.

Seis de Luberri is available for online purchase at Amanti Vino in New Jersey for $19.99 a bottle.

OR, if you happen to find yourself in Brooklyn this week, and want to save on delivery costs, Seis de Luberri 2006, is one of ten featured Thanksgiving “Wines for the Feast,” at Dandelion Wine, a.k.a. Dandy in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, $21/bottle. *

*Present a printed copy of this post at Dandy to receive a 10% discount on this wine, while supplies last.

Dandelion Wine is located at 153 Franklin Street, between Java and India in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Or call 347 689 4563, and ask for Lily.

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?

Tasting at Viña Real, Elciego, Spain, September 2008. Photo by Gretchen Thomas.

A weekly series devoted to Rioja wines that deliver great quality for less than $20

Although more and more wines being produced in Rioja today are opting out of D.O.Ca. Rioja’s age classification system (choosing instead to carry the standard Guarantee of Origin back label, the same designation used for young, unoaked so called joven wines), the great majority of Rioja coming into this country carries the Crianza, Reserva, or Gran Reserva stamp.

Crianzas by law must spend two years at the winery before release, including at least a year in 225 liter oak barrels. It’s the designation with the freshest, fruitiest style, and that accessibility makes them attractive everyday wines.

One of my favorites is the Viña Real Crianza from the house of CVNE, now available in the much-praised 2005 vintage. The color of the wine is somewhere between a rich garnet and light ruby, and the aromas offer lots of red fruit, especially strawberry, (very much in keeping with Tempranillo from Rioja Alavesa, where all Viña Real fruit is sourced), plus a very pleasant mineral character that hints at wet topsoil.

When I last tasted the Viña Real 2005 Crianza, which spent 14 months in a combination of American and French oak, I was particularly struck by its extraordinary balance. Acidity, fruit, mineral, oak all tied together very nicely. Super-quaffable and mouthwateringly fruity, this is about as good as entry level Rioja gets, and it would be very easy to recommend this wine, whether it’s to my mom calling from a wine shop in Virginia looking for ideas of what to buy that night for dinner (I love it when she does that) or to a diner at the restaurant looking for one of those rare “cross-over” wines, which is to say, something that could go with sauteed Tasmanian Sea Trout just as well as it would with Roast Squab.

And speaking of food, thanks to all that red fruit (i.e. cherry and strawberry), this wine would be the perfect foil for Roast Duck Breast, seared skin-side down over high heat to transform all that fat into crackling deliciousness, and finished in the oven until medium rare.

Viña Real 2005 Crianza can be purchased online at the Wine Exchange for $14.99/bottle 

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.

. . .Without the Slaughter

by Taylor Cocalis

The long awaited third and final installment of Taylor’s dispatch of a piglet’s dispatch in the mountains of Ecuador, in which our porcine hero transforms into a transformative meal.

Part one

Part two

Fast forward to the following afternoon: a festive celebration in the form of a shared meal.

At promptly 1PM, two little Ecuadorian girls, Margery & Sophia, knocked on the door to alert us that the feast was almost ready. Margery led me by hand to the preparation station, where the women were putting the finishing touches on everything. Nineteen of us gathered around to watch as they put the first plate together. On the plate they plopped a mound of boiled corn –more starchy than the sweet Jersey corn that I am used to . . . it tasted more like a fresh potato than anything else. Next were the potato cakes, cooked in a large frying pan so that the edges turned deep golden and crispy.

To accompany the starch, the ladies ladled a scoop of aji, an Ecuadorian salsa of sorts that had graced every table that week. Each aji I found was slightly different: some mild and cool, highlighting the fresh cilantro, others tending toward the spicy side; from a runny syrup to a thick paste.

And finally came the pork. They simply cut right into the pig, placing an enormous chunk of moist, juicy meat onto each plate. On top, they placed a decadent square of crispy skin, a gift from the gods. As I stood and watched, one of the ladies would turn around and gave me a small shard to taste, as if I was the well-mannered dog patiently sitting by the table during a holiday meal.

Imagine, for a second, the best potato chip you have ever had, or the crispiest french fry, or the best potato roasted in goose fat. Think about the crackling skin on the Thanksgiving turkey or the golden goodness from your mother’s roast chicken. Now imagine that times one hundred, and you will begin to understand the glory of this pig skin. The fat underneath the skin provided the perfect vehicle to disperse the flavor of the dozen or so indigenous herbs that they rubbed on the pig. When I bit into it, I registered the crisp crunch, and then a gush of flavor flooded over my tongue, almost as if there were little pockets of fat, the consistency of tiny caviar, that exploded as I bit into them. I assure you, this was a pleasure so simple that it could not be replicated with all of the fanciest food technology in the world.

The ladies set the table for us to eat first. Normally, it is against my food religion to eat before everyone is served, but they cared for us with such pride that I could not insult their generosity, and I began to eat. The plate was so large that I thought I could not possibly finish, but somehow, I managed, in a blissful trance from the crackling pork. I would take frequent breaks, walking around to see how the other kids were doing. Surprisingly, even the four-year-olds had plates piled as high as mine, and they managed to soak up every last bit of the celebratory meal, just like I did.

Afterward I snuck back to see the chef, and thank her for the unforgettable meal. She spoke even less English than I do Spanish (which I assure you is not even enough to find the bathroom), but somehow I think the elated smile on my face was able to express my sincere gratitude for not only the food, but the overwhelming hospitality that afternoon. The meal was nothing short of magical.

So when I see the pig slaughter pictures, I cannot see guts and gore. Rather, I remember the satiating feeling I got from sharing a meal with new friends.

Taylor Cocalis manages Murray’s Cheese Course at Murray’s Cheese Shop in New York City and has written here the finest description of eating crispy pork skin I have ever encountered.