Blame it on Rioja

Cold and overcast November days in the Northeast invariably induce cravings for robust meat dishes and, for reasons I cannot fully explain, today that craving is for venison. A couple of years ago, Chanterelle chef David Waltuck served roasted loin of venison with three purees (chestnut, parnsip, and sweet potato), and that is exactly what I have in mind (and what I would make for dinner tonight if I didn’t have to work).

Classic Rioja, which is to say, Rioja aged exclusively in American oak and possessing that beguiling aromatic trio of cigar box, cherries, and dill, is venison’s perfect foil, and the wine I have in mind today that fits that profile perfectly is one that retails for less than $15: Marqués de Tomares Crianza 2005 from the bodega formally known as Unión de Viticultores Riojanos in the town of Funemayor in Rioja Alta.

Made from 90% Tempranillo with 7% Mazuelo and 3% Graciano, with a year in American oak barrels, this particular Tomares Crianza from the warm ‘05 vintage (tasted two weeks ago), was not only highly quaffable and pleasantly fruity but also possessed as much elegance and finesse as one would expect from a Reserva.

Given its food pairing facility with any number of late fall and early winter dishes, the wine’s modest price tag argues in favor of a case purchase with reservation, a cold-weather, go-to stash to warm palate and belly on many a chilly evening to come.

Marqués de Tomares 2005 Crianza is $14.99/bottle at PJ Wine in New York City.

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 

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Into the Upper Ebro Basin

To enter Rioja by car from the northwest, there are two ways you can go: the A-68 (an autopista, or expressway, a toll road), which passes just below an enormous hilltop statue of San Felices (patron Saint of Haro and guardian of the vineyards) before dipping into the Ebro Valley; or, the N-124 (a carretera nacional, or highway), which follows the course of the Rio Ebro towards a narrow gorge called the Conchas de Haro before plunging into a tunnel hollowed out through the limestone massif that forms Rioja’s “northern wall,” as RODA’s Agustín Santolaya calls the region’s chain of northern sierras.

Both are dramatic ways to see Rioja for the first time.

One minute you’re driving through a landscape of wheat fields and forests under cloudy skies fed by the Atlantic Ocean, and then, almost before you can blink, boom!: You’re under blue Mediterranean skies gawking at a stunning panorama of almost nothing but vineyards stretching down into the upper Ebro basin as far as the eye can see.

Tondonia
Our first visit, 10:30 a.m. In retrospect, I wish we had scheduled this visit a little later in the week. This is the visit most anticipated by our group, and it’s over way too fast. Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia, where everything is done more or less the same way it has been for decades, is presently in the midst of a great flowering of recognition and praise, particularly among journalists and sommeliers.

Winemaker Mercedes López de Heredia recognizes me from last year’s interview and I’m quite flattered. Our tasting takes place in the bodega’s cobweb-strewn 19th century bottle cemetery. The whites, all Gran Reservas and all from the Tondonia vineyard, are all astonishing and change in the glass as we taste.

“We can guess, based on the weather conditions, tasting the wine as it ages in the barrel, how a wine will develop in the bottle,” Mercedes tells us. “But for the most part, we don’t know. It’s a mystery.”

The 1970 Blanco has searing acidity and shows remarkable potential to age even more. The 1976 is the most developed of the bunch; its aromas sweet and seductive, a little reminiscent of agua de panela, a raw sugar cane-based hot beverage popular among Colombia’s working class. Twenty minutes later the ‘76 smells like toffee. Remarkable. The 1964 is somewhere in between the ‘70 and ‘76: still very much alive but with all the hallmarks of graceful aging. The 1981, the bodega’s most recent Gran Reserva release, is a little tight at first, and seems positively childish compared to the others. Never thought I’d call a wine from 1981 young.

Viña Real
CVNE has a trifecta of killer properties in Rioja. Imperial is based in Haro, is made entirely from Rioja Alta fruit, and is the most classically styled of the three labels. Viña Real is all Alavesa fruit and comes from one of the region’s most impressive wineries, a gravity-fed, amphitheater-like bodega with barrels rooms that were excavated deep inside the sandstone mountain. And then there is Contino, a terrific single-estate property in nearby Laserna managed by the affable Jesus Madrazo.

In our visit to Viña Real, hosted by José Luis Ripa, we taste wines from all three bodegas. The 2005 Viña Real Crianza has pretty strawberry fruit and a licorice/tar-like spicy mineral character on the nose. The 2001 Viña Real Reserva has aromas of sweet red fruit, moderate alcohol levels considering the ripeness of the year, and excellent length. The Contino 2004 Reserva, with a high proportion of Graciano, has great aromatic complexity on the nose (along with a noticeable whiff of alcohol, which I hadn’t noticed in Reserva’s from earlier vintages). My favorite of the bunch is the 2001 Imperial Reserva, with focused but subdued fruit, a small dose of tobacco pouch-like earthiness, and excellent balance.

The 1860 barrel room at Marqués de Riscal in Elciego, Rioja Alavesa, the region’s first cellar built specifically for oak aging. Photo courtesy Marqués de Riscal.

Suddenly, grappling with the disintegrated cork of an old Bordeaux from the 1960s feels like a cakewalk.

Check out this video that appeared in a recent decanter.com report on a pre-auction dinner held at Christie’s in London last month, in which Marqués de Riscal winemaker Luis Hurtado de Amézaga, a descendant of the bodega’s founder, opens a bottle of 1900 Riscal using red-hot tongs and cold water.

Of the impressive lineup of Riscal wines tasted, the 1900 came out on top. Here are author Stephen Brook’s tasting notes for the 108-year-old beverage (a vintage which, I might add, Luis Hurtado was also tasting for the first time):

1900 Marques de Riscal (pre-phylloxera vines; original cork; 60% Tempranillo, 30% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Graciano; aged 50 months in oak). Medium-deep red with some brick tones, but still bright. Cherry aromas on the nose, exquisitely perfumed and sweet. Medium-bodied, utterly smooth and silky, still remarkably fresh, a touch faded but by no means lacking fruit. The balance is excellent, with no trace of dryness, and the long finish has lift and freshness. Remarkable. 19.5 points

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.

 

 Rioja Podcast 1: Jorge Muga at the Frontiers of Rioja: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (228)

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.

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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