Born-again bodegas of the Rioja

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.