After drinking over 1,000 Riojas in a year while researching a book, John Radford explains how Spain’s best-known red wine continues to reinvent itself with such success
If not actually reinventing the wheel, Rioja is certainly reinventing its wines on a rolling basis, as, astonishingly, it always has done. Since the pioneering Marqués de Murrieta and Marqués de Riscal (as they became) changed the face of the wine in the 1850s, everybody involved in the industry has brought new thinking with every passing generation. The result is an astonishing diversity; from bright, fresh ‘Nouveau’-style wines, through classic, oaky, vanilla-scented gran reservas, to modern, stylish, lightly oaked examples, to the ‘new wave’ high-expression wines geared to terroir and made from ancient plantations of gnarled old Tempranillo – with prices to match.
A little history. For 15 centuries and more, wine was made according to the Roman fashion: grapes pressed by foot in stone lagares (troughs), the juice run off into stone cisterns for fermentation, and thence to goatskins or clay jars for drinking as soon as it had stopped fizzing. It would have been white, or barely pink, since there was no skin maceration to extract colour, and ageing in oak casks – then fabulously expensive and lined with pitch – would have been thought ridiculous.
The big change came from Bordeaux. A pioneering clergyman called Manuel Quintano visited the region in the 1780s and brought back oak casks (not lined with pitch – coopering was much better advanced in France) in which to make and age his wine. The wines were a great success, but the regulatory body at the time controlled all prices and, under pressure from other producers who didn’t want to spend the kind of money needed to buy Bordeaux casks, prevented him from selling at a price that reflected his production costs. The French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars precluded any further experimentation, and Quintano returned to his religious duties.
Political turmoil in the first half of the 19th century saw internecine wars and struggles for the throne of Spain, which drove many landowners out of the country for the duration, and the two most significant – from a Rioja-wine point of view – were Luciano (later the Marqués) de Murrieta, aide-de-camp to the overthrown dictator General Espartero (the Duque de la Victoria), and Camilo Hurtado de Amézaga (later Marqués de Riscal). By various means, both of these men spent some time in Bordeaux observing winemaking methods, and they took them back to their own land holdings in Rioja, with Murrieta making his first vintage in 1852 (in a bodega belonging to the Duque de la Victoria) and Riscal creating the first purpose-built Bordeaux-style bodega in 1860. The result was what we may now regard as ‘Classic’ Rioja: ripe fruit, toasty oak, vanilla aromas and long life.
But a great deal has happened since then. The diversity of wines from Spain’s best-known red-wine producing area is greater now than it has ever been. There are specialist bodegas producing only the new-wave high-expression wines, but interestingly, many, if not most, bodegas are producing at least one top-of-the-range wine of this type. The full range of styles follows, broadly grouped under four headings:
Historic Rioja
These are made mainly by maceración carbónica – in sealed vessels under enzymatic fermentation to retain all the fruit of the grape. The style is much like the old Roman lagar process (except that in those days the fermenting pulp was sealed in by the blanket of carbon dioxide given off as a by-product), but the equipment is much more high-tech. The wines are classified as jóvenes (that is, with less than 12 months in oak), bottled with little or no oak ageing and destined for early drinking. Most wines of this type fall into the cheap-and-cheerful category and represent excellent value for money – they’ve been described as Spain’s answer to Beaujolais Nouveau.
There are, however, a very few that can be classified as world-class fine wines. One of the best of them is R. (pronounced erre punto) from Fernando Remírez de Ganuza in Samaniego. Uniquely in Rioja he cuts the bunches of grapes in half on the selection table, on the grounds that the top of the bunch receives more sunlight (and is therefore riper). The top half goes into his mainstream wines, the bottom half into the tank for R., a wine of enormous freshness and aromatics that sells for around €15 – five times the price commanded by the more ‘everyday’ styles. Another good example is Murmurón from Sierra Cantabria, which has a lighter, fresher and more traditional style than R. and sells at about €8 – still more than double the ‘normal’ rate for a joven Rioja.
Classic Rioja
These are the wines that the world has come to recognise as Rioja, as pioneered by Murrieta, Riscal and their successors in the second half of the 18th century. The style is warm, ripe raspberry/strawberry Tempranillo fruit, with a ‘bite’ of toasty oak. Most of the great producers now routinely hand sort the grapes, and in the best houses the winemaker will decide which grapes are suitable for which level of ageing – crianza, reserva or gran reserva. In practice, the best grapes will have come from known high-quality plots and probably from old vines with low yields. Most bodegas ferment in several batches and make the final selection once the process is complete – and the crucial decision has to be made when the new wine goes into cask. There is a popular supposition that wine originally destined to be crianza but that is showing well after its year in cask may be upgraded to reserva simply by giving it extra time in barrel and bottle, but this seldom happens under the hands of the great winemakers who really know their vines.
Crianza wines will tend to be made from fruit of younger vines, and the elaboration will be aimed at achieving the ‘four-way balance’ between fruit, acid, tannin and sugars – and these all have to be naturally present in the fruit: chaptalisation is forbidden in Spain. Once this balance is achieved, the winemaker has to choose the age and origin of his wood and then rack the wine often enough to ensure that it comes to maturity after two years – although, of course, many crianza wines go on for a great deal longer than that. Similar decisions will be made for grapes/wine considered good enough for extra ageing to become reserva or gran reserva. Another decision at this point is whether the very best grapes will go into the company’s gran reserva or into a new-wave wine (see below).
The original style of Classic Rioja was also due partly to the large-pored American oak, typically from forests in the warm southern states, that gives a warm, toasty edge to the wine, as well as vanillin, which is one of the wine’s prime characteristics. Increasingly since the 1980s, many of the top bodegas have been experimenting with French oak, which has smaller pores, and some are also testing casks made from oak from Russia and the other emergent east-European states. Oak with smaller pores has a slower effect on the wine and ‘grooms’ it for greater ageing. Many of the finest gran reservas are aged in Allier, for example, to ensure that they’ll last for many years. The greatest of these reach a sublime maturity: perfumed, cigar-box aromas on the nose, and deep , dark fruit with an endless burnished finish on the palate.
The pioneers are, of course, still very much in business. Murrieta built a magnificent estate just outside Logroño in 1872, and this passed into the hands of the Cebrián family, Condes de Creixell, in 1983. After the untimely death of his father, the present Count, Vicente, started something of a programme of modernisation, but without disturbing the bodega’s reputation for classic, oak-aged wines. The range now is as good as it has ever been and much better than it was in the 1970s. Marqués de Riscal is still run by the founding family in the person of Francisco Hurtado de Amézaga, and although the style is very classic, the bodega has a new winery and an eye-popping visitor centre designed by Frank Gehry (of Guggenheim Bilbao fame). Riscal exploits the fact that the founder planted Cabernet Sauvignon from Bordeaux, and those vines are still being propagated in flagship wine Barón de Chirél.
Perhaps the most traditional bodega of all is López Heredia, which has stocks of wine going back well into the 19th century; the 1913 is still on sale in Spain at the time of writing, for €350 a bottle. They also still make the traditional gran reserva white wines.
Modern Rioja
This was a trend created by Enrique Forner when he founded Marques de Cáceres in 1970. He returned from Bordeaux (where his family owned two châteaux) and decided that the wines of Rioja were far too oaky and that, in many cases, the fruit was being obscured by the wood. He also wanted to build a château-style winery and make a ‘village wine’ from around Cenicero, just as he had done in the Médoc. He installed stainless-steel tanks (then almost unheard of in Rioja) and, well, the rest is history.
Other than a reduction in the amount of oak (which passed into national law in the late 1970s), selection and winemaking are the same as for ‘classic’ wines. Most producers now make a modern-style wine, and stainless steel is the norm in most bodegas. Cáceres’s wines are mainly aimed at the mid-market, but 1994 was so good that he made a flagship wine called Gaudium, and in 2001 he made a ‘junior’ version called MC, both of which are heading towards the ‘new wave’ style.
New-wave Rioja
This is the most interesting, controversial development, and the first stirrings of it were seen in 1987 with the establishment of a bodega called RODA in Haro. The owners are Catalans who came to Rioja without the preconceptions of the locals. They did cadastral surveys, bought or leased the best plots of land and gave the winemaker carte blanche to make the best wine he could – price was not an issue. The first RODA wine was released in 1992 to instant controversy. It was a big blockbuster of a wine, packed with tight fruit locked inside a tannic shell, with tremendous power and an explosive palate. The grey beards shook their heads and said that, while it’s a very good wine, it’s not proper Rioja (which is what they must have said to Murrieta and Riscal all those years ago). It is, however, made from Tempranillo grapes and aged in oak (admittedly French) for 16 months, in the time-honoured manner. And many bodegas have followed suit, with even some of the most classic producing at least one top-of-the-range ‘new wave’-style wine. RODA trumped them again in 1999 with a single-vineyard wine called Cirsión, which sells in Spain for about €140 a bottle.
Playing, as it were, Riscal to RODA’s Murrieta, Miguel-Ángel Gregorio established Finca Allende in Briones in 1995. He was actually born on the Marqués de Murrieta estate, where his father was the winemaker, and he learned the trade at his father’s knee. Like RODA, he sought out small plots of old vines and gradually bought them up from about 1986 onwards, producing his first vintage in 1995. Once again, it’s all Tempranillo and aged in (mainly Tronçais) oak, but it’s very much in the blockbusting style of RODA. A year later, the bodega produced a single-vineyard wine called Calvario from vines planted in 1945. The flagship wine from the oldest plots is called Aurus and is quite sublime.
There is another controversy attached to these wines, however. The question that has been asked of these fabulous grapes from magnificent old vineyard plots is, Where did they go before there were new-wave wines? Did they, perhaps, go in small quantities into the greatest gran reservas of Rioja, enhancing and polishing them to their final perfection? And, if so, what has become of those gran reservas now? Are they as good as they used to be? I can only speak from having tasted about 1,000 Riojas in the space of a year, but I would say that the very best of them are still among the very best wines in the world.
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