Blame it on Rioja

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.

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.

Had the privilege of enjoying ripe local tomatoes twice this past weekend, first at Chanterelle, where I had lunch with two friends on Saturday, and again last night at Dressler in Williamsburg, where giant tomato disks are stacked together with hunks of watermelon, a summer perennial that’s getting a lot of play these days on both restaurant menus and on the glossy pages of fancy food magazines.

The appearance of tomatoes in local markets (and of corn and peaches) defines late summer for a lot of folks like me, and like with every seasonal bounty, there is always a quest to see how many different ways we can use them at home.

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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.

A reader named Abel Iturriaga recently wrote in about a very pleasant experience he had visiting Bodegas Santiago Ijalba in Gimileo, a village in Rioja Alta situated about half-way between Haro and Briones on the old Logroño highway.

Ijalba tends towards the modern style, making two types of blancos, Ermita San Felices (stainless steel fermented in the Marques de Cáceres style) and Abando Blanco, late-harvest Viura fermented in American oak barricas (most barrel fermented whites use French oak) and kept on its lees for five months. Although the Abando Blanco is clearly produced in the modern way, my notes from a 2006 T. Edward tasting say that it still “retains the best traits of the traditional style–nutty and complex.” I quite liked the Ogga 2000 Reserva, a 100% Tempranillo-based wine made from 60 year old vines and aged for 17 months in French oak and 3 months in American oak. I found the wine to have “good acidity, a dose of pepper, and a lengthy finish. Nice balance of modern and traditional aromas.”

Oddly enough, the Ogga 2001 Reserva, which I ordered in January of this year at Casa Mono with my friend Colum Sheehan, the GM at Babbo, disappointed me, as it lacked the balance I really liked in the 2000; I found it a little too extracted and somewhat over the top. A quick glance at the bodega’s website today, and I discovered that the winemaker has done away with the 3 months of American oak aging for the Ogga Reserva, opting instead for a full 20 months in French oak, which I suspect is all or mostly new oak. I also learned that the 2001 underwent three days of pre-fermentation maceration, although I don’t recall if the same was done for the 2000. In my view, the 2001 still needs time to mellow. Not surprisingly, Jay Miller of the Wine Advocate quite liked the 2001 Reserva, giving it 91 points in his most recent review of Spanish wine.

And here we enter again into a debate playing out all over the world: does the movement away from established methods of vinification, even if we’re talking about a mere 3 months in a different oak type, make a wine any less regionally specific?

I think more important, and I suspect most of my sommelier colleagues would agree, is how does the food compatibility of a new version of the same wine compare with that of its predecessor? In this case, I have to say that I think the 2000 might be a better choice to enjoy with a meal, even as I fully understand the rationale behind the winemaker’s decision in this case to tweak his wine in a different direction.

Ogga 2001 Reserva is imported by T. Edward Wines.

Zaha Hadid pavilion at López de Heredia, Haro, Spain. Photo courtesy Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia.

In my last post, I mentioned that I had had an epiphany in a North Carolina women’s shoe store without explaining what that epiphany was.

As I began typing my response to Lawrence Osborne’s Men’s Vogue article, “Final Harvest,” I realized I was heading into more serious territory, ran out of time, and decided to post a teaser, figuring I would add the rest later that day.

Well, my word count kept growing and my other life intervened, but I did manage to carve out some time today to flesh out my thoughts and edit out a significant chunk of what was threatening to become a small monograph on the subject.

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Original tasting room at Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia, Haro, Spain. Photo: John Barkley

As much as I admire ladies’ footwear, I don’t normally have epiphanies in women’s shoe stores. Maybe it was the altitude.

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